


Vespers

by gidget_goes



Series: Vespers [1]
Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Action/Adventure, F/M, Mild Language, Non-Graphic Violence, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, Spies & Secret Agents, anyway was this inspired by james bond or backyardigans: agent secret? i'll never tell, like if i ever get around to it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-06-26 21:45:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 71,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19777051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gidget_goes/pseuds/gidget_goes
Summary: “Just a tonic water for me, please.” Alternis fixed Edea with a pointed look. “I don’t drink on the job.”“Tequila,” said Edea to the bartender, flashing a flinty smile of her own. “With a bendy straw.”Alternis Dim is the Agency’s very own Chameleon: cold-blooded and utterly invisible. But his new partner in (anti-)crime knows not only just how to find him – she’s constantly pushing his buttons! With a kidnappers’ plot unfolding around them, Alternis knows he has to keep his head down for the good of the mission . . . but what happens when sparks begin to fly?





	1. Shaken (Not Stirred)

As near as Alternis Dim could tell, the average emperor penguin had one hundred forty-seven thousand, two hundred eighty-one feathers. This meant an average of five and a half feathers per square inch on its front, thirteen per square inch on his back, and that he was beginning to re-evaluate his life choices.

There was _something_ to be said about the gala, all in all: there was something charged and expectant in the way the spotlights glittered blue off ice sculptures and in how silk rustled along the red-carpeted floor; something thrilling about watching flashbulbs pop like lightning for each A-lister to tumble from a limo to the thunder of applause. But for each momentary reprieve from his boredom, it only came back harder and stronger, and it multiplied like those penguin feathers did.

 _“—counting_ feathers _is_ not _the use of those lenses!”_

The irate voice crackling along his comms unit was only just enough to pull Alternis from his reverie, and he plastered a smile he didn’t feel to his face as he made to respond.

“At least now you know the cam-contacts _work_ ,” he whispered. There were hardly enough people watching to warrant him hiding his face behind his wine glass as he made to look back up at the photo installation – a sprawling Antarctic landscape, dotted with high-resolution emperor penguins – but Alternis was a man of habit. A _“click!”_ some two metres behind him told him he’d have some two seconds before the next camera went off, and Alternis was sure to capitalise on it. He blinked hard until the computer display in front of his vision faded, and the penguins were no longer quite so _“1080P.”_ “Truly, Dr. Horoskoff,” he went on, “you’ve outdone yourself.”

Dr. Norzen Horoskoff was a hulking sort of man with a booming kind of voice, which was perhaps why Alternis was so continually shocked by the delicate gadgets he built. But he had been working with the Central Intelligence Agency for nearly twice as long as Alternis had been alive, and had yet to let them down.

Horoskoff’s tangent was likely to go on, but Alternis did not have the time. As surreptitiously as he could, he reached behind the earpiece of his (fake) glasses to switch the channels on his comms unit, and waited for a more commanding voice to fill the static.

_“Chameleon, the soft target.”_

“Roger.” When he’d enrolled with the Agency, Alternis had also signed up for two weeks of ventriloquism training. His roommate had laughed at the idea – but his roommate was dead, now, after opting for the L-pill over interrogation at the enemy’s hands. And Alternis was at the gala dinner of the year, _now_ , awaiting the arrival of the Yulyana Peace Prize laureate . . . with none of the attendees the wiser that he was in the heat of clandestine conversation.

After the parade of Bentleys and Benzes, the electric Prius might, to an outsider, have seemed out of place. In truth, though, this shabby town-car was the one that the paparazzi and the press had been waiting for all night. The tinted windows and the Ancheim licence plate could only have belonged to one woman: Agnès Oblige.

The Pope. The only woman ever to hold a position of power in the Crystal Orthodoxy. The Yulyana Peace Prize laureate. _And, of course most importantly,_ Alternis reminded himself, _our subject._

“Operation Crystal Ball is go,” he said, smile tight.

 _“Knock ‘em dead, Chameleon.”_ There was a pause. _“Or, rather, make sure nobody else does.”_

Agnès Oblige might have been a beautiful woman. No, Alternis would later think, she _was_. The devotion to her faith and her philanthropy made even her shier smiles brighter than the floodlights the Agency used for interrogations, and her dark eyes sparkled with kindness under that tasteful winged liner. But Alternis couldn’t help but think of the stark white of her robes as a beacon, the quartz amulet at her chest as a target: she seemed to him an amalgam of shapes that just screamed, _“Shoot me!”_

Which was, of course, why he was attending the gala. Alternis remembered joking to his superiors that the most coveted diplomatic event of the year made a poor scene for an assassination – that he would have chosen a hotel room, a date with dinner and a dagger – but that was hardly the point. Ever since it had been announced in October that the Pope should be awarded the, well, _award_ , terror threats had been crawling like termites from the international woodwork. Alternis couldn’t be certain if people hated the poor she helped in general or the Pope herself on principle, but one thing was sure: there were a lot of people who wanted her dead. It was up to the Agency to prevent that . . . if for no other reason than they made more photogenic bodyguards than the Marines.

Alternis had been a Marine. He would know.

His alias just barely made the B-list, but Alternis was glad for his perch toward the shabby end of the red carpet.He watched with hawklike focus as Her Excellency glided down its rich polyester, and took careful note of everyone she shook hands with. There was the President of the United States of Luxendarc ( _There,_ thought Alternis ruefully, _is my boss, who just doesn’t know it_ ), there was Praline à la Mode, that blondie pop star who’d just made the big leagues. Any one of them could have any amount of C-4 strapped to their push-up bras. Still, when Agnès Oblige stopped in front of him, Alternis was all smiles.

“Your Excellency.” He bowed. He wasn’t sure why. “Ringabel Newman, Amnesty International.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Alternis wasn’t even the usual _“Ringabel.”_ That would have been Agent Nikolanikov, some ten years his senior (and some ten times stockier). But Nikolanikov was stationed in Yunohana, working with local diplomats to exfiltrate Luxendarcian intelligencers caught up in a nasty little rebellion that – ironically enough – the Pope had been the cause of. He’d taken Ringabel’s silver wig with him, though, and Alternis was the only platinum blond on hand. With glasses and a padded tweed suit, even Nikolanikov might have believed the transformation (provided, of course, he was still alive).

“Mr. Newman, it’s a pleasure,” said Agnès, and she introduced herself in turn, as though there was a soul alive who did not know who she was. Then she smiled. “Your work is truly inspiring.”

Between his lighthearted legend and his Lirac Mont-Redon, Alternis was half-tempted to joke. _What work? The war crimes or the more white-collar fraud?_

He did not, of course, say that. What he did say was, “It’s been an honour,” and he stepped back as elegantly as he could in his wingtips to encourage Agnès to move on. She did so without a backwards glance, and Alternis twisted his tongue into his cheek as he spoke through clenched teeth into his comms again. “Subject marked,” he said, and blinked his cam-contacts back on. Once more, his gaze slid out of focus, and then came back in sharper than an Agency-issue multipurpose knife. This time, though, Alternis could narrow his eyes to just make out the Pope’s blurry white figure on a tiny display on his left, and the red dot of her brand-new tracker on his right. “I have eyeball. Are the spooks on-site?”

_“Negative, Chameleon. Not to worry, though, you’re two minutes ahead of schedule.”_

Two minutes was, coincidentally, the longest Alternis had ever spent being waterboarded.

The thought sent a familiar shiver down his spine, and Alternis imagined that tension running all the way through his borrowed clothes: turning his waistcoat to Kevlar, his four-in-hand now standard-issue fatigues. He could do with the extra protection. Though he was, as far as anyone milling about the Archduke’s palace was concerned, just a philanthropist, Alternis felt uncomfortably visible. Naked.

The best disguises might usually have been the thinnest, but he could have gone for a burlap sack.

When the platinum minute hand of the First Husband’s wristwatch made its second pass past twelve, Alternis found himself clearing his throat, as gently as he could. “T-minus zero,” he announced, as he made for the cover of a nearby crowd. “Are the spooks—”

_“Negative.”_

“Shit.”

Alternis was neither so stupid nor so desperate as to keep on his comms through dinner, no matter how well that ventriloquist and their sex doll had taught him. Through the hors d’oeuvres and the soup, he managed pleasant playback with the man across from him: the previous year’s laureate, Tiz Arrior. He was about as grey as the cod they were eating for third course – but luckily, considerably more alive. Still, come entrées, Alternis’ stomach was beginning to turn – not only because of the precautionary Pepto-Bismol he’d chugged before the gala (in case of mild poisoning, of either the food or anthrax variety). Tiz’s eyes were wide as Alternis wrapped shaky fingers around his fourth fork.

“Mr. Newman, are you quite all right?”

Alternis tried for a smile as he looked around the dining hall. There were two tables lining the hardwood floor, forming a _“V”_ away from the podium where Agnès Oblige would give her acceptance speech in – he snuck a glance at Tiz’s watch – eighty minutes. He was grateful for the heady silence shrouding the seats he shared with Tiz (and some forty others). Though it pressed down on his shoulders and semi-soggy venison with a leaden weight, Alternis far preferred the pressure to what he saw on the table opposite theirs: the house red flowing like a fountain, and a flurry of hand-sewn sequins as a young woman at the table’s head told some animated story. _Praline à la Mode,_ he supposed, taking in the brilliant blue gown and the teased blonde hair. There was an intensity to the whole display he found even harder to stomach than his dinner, and Alternis turned back to Tiz with a grimace.

“I suppose I’m just not quite used to all this glitz,” he decided. Tiz smiled.

“Tell me about it. Last winter, I flew here straight from the ‘rez, and I nearly boked before my speech.”

“You’re kidding.” Alternis’ cheeks rather cramped as he tried to stretch his grin wider. “I . . . can’t see that happening.”

What he really couldn’t see was the footage he was expecting. There were still only two feeds playing to his cam-contacts: the blip of the tracker he’d slipped to Agnès’ palm, and the blurry B-roll from the drone following its satellite signal. By now, all six of the _“spooks”_ – on-site agents whose sole job was to monitor the mark, rather than play the floor like Alternis did – ought to have been spinning their web around the Yulyana gala. Even static would have been preferable to the blankness he had now: knowing the spooks had been compromised would have at least meant they’d shown up.

Out of the corner of his eye, Alternis saw the blue sequins fade from the dining hall, and he imagined a tiny portion of his headache leaving with them. But in its absence came a creeping, sticky dread, raising bile in his throat and sweat along his carefully powdered forehead. Before he was even wholly sure what he was doing, Alternis pushed away from the table, chair screeching just like his thoughts did.

“Mr. Newman, are you _sure_ you’re feeling okay?”

Alternis made a show of adjusting his glasses as he fumbled for his comms unit, hands shaking as he flicked through the audio channels until his hearing filled with Central Command’s familiar static. “I’ll be just a minute,” he was quick to assure Tiz. Then, remembering his training – and the dossier he’d been given on all the gala guests – Alternis tried for a wink. “Cover for me?”

For the first time, Tiz Arrior flushed. “I’d be glad to.”

Unlike the other Yulyana Prizes, which were presented by the Eternian Prime Minister in the capital city of Gathelatio, the Peace Prize was presented by the last vestige of the country’s nobility: the geriatric, gangling Lester DeRosso, whose palace might actually have been larger than the neighbouring country of Eorzea. From what Alternis knew of the craggy country’s history, the shift in location meant building bridges between the quasi-democratic Parliament and the uneasy monarchy it had violently replaced. To him, though, and to most foreign agents, the new party venue was only a cause of ulcer. As much as Alternis was loving the huge photographs of polar fauna and the now-dusty red carpet, the palace was a labyrinth of hallways and rafters, each one housing myriad nooks and crannies where an aspiring terrorist could have hidden himself.

Alternis had been moving down the hallways on autopilot, his only points of focus the stationary dots of Agnès Oblige on his cam-contact display as he tread a classic, fanning recon path along the first and second floors of the palace. He’d been studying the floor plans for weeks, after all, even before he was promoted from spook to Ringabel – he knew the palace’s layout better than he did the back of his hand (and that wasn’t just because he’d recently had a skin graft operation to the back of his hand, covering a nasty acid burn he’d gotten in Sagitta). This was to say, despite the constant vigilance drilled into him by years of training, Alternis was only half-paying attention as he rounded corners . . . which meant he only half-saw the flash of blue glitter as it doubled back on a panel of wallpaper he knew hid a secret door.

“Chameleon to Central Command,” hissed Alternis, urgency wresting anxiety’s vicelike grip from his throat. “Do you read me?”

_“Chameleon, your tracker indicates you’ve left your post—”_

“Affirmative,” he choked out, running for the end of the hall now. “The others never established visual – or contact. I’m taking on the trigger myself.”

There was a long pause before Alternis heard his boss’, the Marshal’s, voice once more. _“All right, then, what’s your copy?”_

Alternis came to a skidding halt by the end of the hallway, and by a wide window, open to the icy gravel of the palace grounds below. Though the blizzards of the early winter had largely settled by now, there was still enough of a breeze for hair to muss and collars to flip . . . and for stray blue sequins to dance across the dimly lit hallway. “I have a suspected sleeper. Praline à la Mode. Code name . . . ” Alternis rolled his lips, trying to come up with a good one. “Uh, Bluejay.”

_“Fitting. She’s awful annoying.”_

“That she is.” Alternis rocked on his heels as he waited – _Five,_ he counted, _five, six, seven_ – until he knew he would be a safe distance behind even the slowest-moving of terrorists. “I’m going black, boss. I’ll report back within the hour.”

And with that, Alternis snapped off his comms unit, folded up his glasses, and broke into a run.

The servants’ hallways were a welcome change of pace from the Baroque-style mess of the main palace, but in a bad suit and Nikolanikov-sized shoes (padded with insoles so they’d fit an undercover Alternis) running was still a challenge. By the time Alternis had followed the faded, stiletto-shaped footprints and stray sequins up to the cramped corridors of the fifth and final floor, his heart was burning a hole through his too-tight ribs, and his every breath seemed to scrape against sandpaper before needling into his lungs. Despite his every instinct telling him not to, Alternis couldn’t help himself from pressing his spine into the wall, desperate for a moment to compose himself—

_“Click!”_

—but a field agent ought to have known better.

“State your business, love.”

It was with bated breath that Alternis wrenched his gaze from the barrel of the tiny, silver pistol pointed to the slim figure behind it. His heart fell as the blurry colours and shapes began to come into focus: as he saw that the young woman’s hair was drowned-rat flat, and the colour of straw rather than that covergirl gold; as he took in the frayed hems of a sequinned prom dress that ought never have been able to cross the red carpet.

“You . . . ” Alternis swallowed hard as he straightened, trying for a combat stance. “You’re not Praline à la Mode.”

“Crystals,” said the young woman, accent clipped, “I should hope not.” There was a cold fury in her sharp blue eyes. “She’s awful annoying.”

_“Crack!”_

Even with the dusty hallway around him illuminated by Horoskoff’s latest in micro-LEDs, Alternis could barely register the flash of silver as it whipped in front of his face. At his feet lay the dented remains of the pistol’s slide and magazine: Alternis’ first instinct had been to grab his _“Bluejay”_ by the wrist and strike the gun from her hands, and trigger the disassembling mechanism as she spun back into her balance – but even without the bullets, the pistol lashed across Alternis’ jaw harder than brass knuckles ever had, and he cursed himself for not launching the damn thing off the nearest balcony.

Instead, he charged.

The Bluejay was fast even in her stiletto heels, but Alternis was faster. When she swung again with her makeshift mace, Alternis slammed his arm into the crook of her elbow, and struck as she fell off balance again. But just before the side of his free palm connected with her throat, she reeled back. She struck up her arm to block his blow, but before he could register, she’d rotated them both so his wrist was in her fist, and her free hand was coming up to his elbow. She was moving to put him in an armlock, Alternis knew – from which point her next strike would be to the neck.

It wasn’t classy, but he kicked.

He’d had an inkling her cleavage wasn’t entirely real.

“Classy, Romeo,” sneered the Bluejay. Something dark – water, Alternis supposed, or silicone gel, whatever liquid had been lining her bra – was spreading in a starburst from across her chest, and he could feel its icy kind of stickiness sinking in to his knee where he’d connected.

“Maybe you should consider going _natural_ ,” he shot back. He watched her grit her teeth, heard the small _“pop!”_ of her jaw as it clenched. Anger, Alternis knew, slowed a fighter down. They got sloppy. So when the heel of her palm came darting toward his nose, Alternis was ready once more to knock her wild haymaker aside—

“Ow!”

—only for her fingers to close around a shock of his white hair, and pull him forward!

“Now who’s _classy_?” hissed Alternis, but the Bluejay wasn’t done. She wrenched his head forward before slamming him back into the wall – and then, to his surprise, reached for the soggy front of her dress once more. Realisation dawned on him too slowly as she pulled one of the limp gel pads from inside what was left of the push-up bra, and squeezed hard.

His first instinct was to squeeze his eyes shut, but of course that did him no good. The contact lens remained fast where it was on the surface of his left eye, and as it short-circuited, he could feel a thousand too-unnatural shocks crackling across his cornea. The Bluejay stepped back with a wicked grin, shaking the last of the water (was it water? Alternis didn’t know much about push-up bra construction) from her free hand.

“I see Bad Gadgets LLC still hasn’t realised they should equip you boys with _waterproof contact lenses_ ,” she simpered. Alternis opened his mouth to counter, but nothing came out. Between the stinging in his left eye and the sharp pain along his hairline, where the Bluejay’s manicured hand was pulling tight, he was most decidedly disoriented – and still a little out of breath.

“What do _you_ know about cam-contacts?” Alternis finally panted out. He’d managed to flip the shorting lens from his eye, but he didn’t need to wait for his vision to fully return to know he’d lost the visual on the Pope herself. The thought sent an army of icy-footed beetles marching down his spine, and a shock through his gut. She’d known he was wearing the lenses. She’d known to target them.

Which meant she’d know who he’d been watching.

The Bluejay, for her part, only spat, arching her eyebrows. “What do you know,” she countered, “about the sniper rig lined up on the balcony overlooking the dining hall?”

Alternis narrowed his eyes. “I know it won’t be used tonight.”

“Conceding defeat, are you?”

If he squinted any harder, Alternis feared his eyelashes would get tangled. Still, he felt his heart skip a too-rapid beat, and it seemed though his blood was running hot and cold all at once, and pumping in the wrong direction: draining from his brain and settling in his leaden hands and feet. “‘Defeat?’” he echoed. He fixed the Bluejay with an expectant look, but when she only balked back at him, Alternis knew he’d have to explain. “Miss, I’m _not_ the target you think I am.”

_I’m not here to kill the Pope._

You’re _not here to kill the Pope._

The Bluejay’s silence only lasted a heartbeat, but it felt like an eternity to Alternis, as he watched emotions flicker across her face: shock, anger, resignation. Dread. When she spoke again, it was in unison with him.

“We’ve got to run.”

Alternis took off like one of the bullets the Bluejay never had the chance to fire, and he knew she was hot on his heels. Breathing hard, he fumbled for his comms, and wasted no pleasantries (nor ventriloquists’ tricks) barking into it. “Come in,” he panted, “come—”

“There’s no time!” screeched the Bluejay, though Alternis could see the telltale blinking light of a headset from behind a curtain of her hair. He couldn’t help but bristle at the sight, and when she turned a steely glare on him, he shot back,

“Maybe we should _make_ time! If I’d received any word there would be another operative here, we could have avoided—”

“Oh, _don’t_ you start whining!” The Bluejay came to a skidding stop as she paused to rip off her stiletto heels, but Alternis knew better than to wait, taking some small satisfaction in his head start. Still, the tension headache nestled at the base of his skull seemed to only grow sharper and more insistent with each of her shrill words. “Don’t you put this on me, Romeo. _Not_ when you’re the one who followed me!”

“You pistol-whipped me!”

“You _kicked me_ in the fifty-sterling _water-bra_!”

Alternis felt his scowl deepen at her words, foundation cracking along a thousand fine lines and tongue twisting into the wisdom teeth he still hadn’t had pulled. She had him there.

A slim sliver of light was stretching across the dusty floor some ways ahead of them, from a crack in the siding of the wall. Though her shoulders were tense and his heart was high in his throat, Alternis knew an understanding passedbetween the two of them as they began edging toward the loose panel. This must have once been how servants snuck out into the fifth floor proper – and now, with any luck, it would save a life.

If they weren’t too late.

 _Don’t think like that,_ Alternis chided himself, as he beckoned the Bluejay closer to him. She held her fists in front of her face proactively, ready – and if he was any judge of her character, raring – to go.

He held up his hand, and folded down a finger. _On three,_ he signalled to her. He watched her give an imperceptible nod, and then he balled his fist entirely. _Three!_

She was the one to kick the servants’ doorway open, and Alternis’ first instinct was relief, as the soft yellow light of the palace atrium showed him where the worn wood ended and the marble of the balcony began. They had picked the right door. But just as clear as the contrast between the flooring was the long, sharp shadow of an all-too-familiar shape: a sniper rifle, trained on the podium five floors below.

And, of course, the hunched figure of the black-clad sniper himself.

Agnès Oblige had already taken to the stage to a round of applause that shook the balustrade of the balcony, and there was a moment when all was still: the entire world seemed to exist within the stone walls of the palace, and it hung in suspension as she announced in that high, clear voice how she’d striven tirelessly for peace between followers of _“the Crystals or the Crescent”_ in Ancheim. The press had been hounded inside after the dinner itself was over, and Alternis could see that the floor below was awash in the white glow of camera flashes and spotlights and those immaculate white robes. But in the centre of Agnès’ image was a tiny red dot – too faint to see, Alternis knew, unless one was equipped with cam-contacts.

The sniper still hadn’t moved, and Alternis swallowed hard. The Bluejay stood stiffly beside him, but she wouldn’t wait for a signal forever. Indeed, as soon as Alternis had thought it, she moved silently for the holster at her thigh . . . but it was empty.

 _Thanks a lot,_ said her cold blue eyes, and Alternis knew that when she made a tense finger-gun at him, it wasn’t to compliment him on getting them this far. But before he could react, she’d (evidently) found her plan B, and her foot came crashing down on the sniper’s spine.

The poor sod must not have been a fighter. He took half a minute to roll over and clamber to his feet, and Alternis could see the whites of his eyes through the black mesh of his mask. It was all the invitation Alternis needed. He shoved past the Bluejay to strike the sniper in the stomach, and, once he was doubled over, grabbed the man in a headlock.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “What is your business with Pope Oblige?”

The man said nothing, and Alternis tightened his hold around the man’s neck on instinct. “Speak!”

“Let me,” said the Bluejay. She didn’t wait for an answer before breaking Alternis’ grip on the man so she could shove him forward over the balustrade. “You strip the gun.”

Alternis turned on the rifle with a desperate kind of fervour. He hadn’t seen a gun like this since his Corps days, and this was a new model, besides: the catches and levers he was used to had been replaced by sleek curves. But as a chorus of grunts and shuffling fabric began to fill the air – the Bluejay, Alternis knew, doing her best to beat an answer from the sniper – he knew he had to work fast. There came the dust cover, the recoil spring; there was the snap that should have taken off the scope. But it was screwed on fast. Alternis felt a familiar chill creeping up the walls of his throat, edging his heartbeat into a shivering overdrive. _Come on, Chameleon,_ he told himself, as firmly as he could. _You’ve got to work to work to—_

“ _Aieee_!”

Though Agnès’ speech below and the commotion on their balcony up above had urged time back onto its normal course, it seemed to Alternis that it was hitching again: that everything was happening all at once, but in a sick, twisted slow motion. He could see every step as it unfolded around him, but he couldn’t keep up, couldn’t interfere.

But there it was. There was the Bluejay, suddenly hanging from the wrong side of the balustrade, her pale fingers wrapped tightly around the marble balusters. And there was the black-clad sniper, moving with an urgency he’d not had before, prying at her pinkies – trying to make her fall. Alternis would have sworn, if he’d had the time. Instead, he picked the whole rifle up and tossed it over the side of the balcony, not caring where it landed. It was an instinctive act . . . but, Alternis realised, too slowly, also his first mistake.

_“I would have chosen a hotel room. A date, with dinner and a dagger.”_

His own words rang hollow through his memory as the dining hall at the atrium’s base erupted in startled screaming. This was never meant to be an assassination – but a statement. And even as Alternis went through those reflexive motions, ducking, weaving, and striking at the sniper – whose actions grew more fevered by the second – he knew that he’d lost the upper hand. The situation was no longer contained.

“Everyone, please stay calm!”

Agnès Oblige’s voice may still have had that world-famous melody, but her timbre was coloured by a stiff sort of fear. This time, Alternis did swear, and he ignored it as the sniper snickered behind the mask. Having civilians in the fray would have been one thing. Having civilians take charge was quite another.

Somewhere, down below, someone was calling for security. Alternis couldn’t know who. What he did know was that the sniper was getting cocky, pressing the offence. That the Bluejay was crying out in rage, over _“bleeding bastards”_ and _“useless sods.”_ And that he’d walked right into a trap.

Security guards in their own black mesh were pouring into the hall below them, now, like ants over that Michelin-starred picnic. Alternis saw the sniper back away, ducking inside the servants’ corridor. He’d be licking his wounds for a minute, maybe two, before he took off running – because his job was done. Even without taking the first shot, the chaos below would have ensured that any one of his backups or co-conspirers would have had clear access to Her Excellency.

It seemed to take hours before his body caught up to his reeling mind, but Alternis knew he had to act fast. He took the Bluejay’s wrists in his hands and pulled up, hard, until her feet found the edge of the balcony and she vaulted over its rail. “Took you long enough, Romeo,” she snapped. Alternis shook his head.

“The gunman’s gone that way,” he explained, tersely. She seemed to understand, taking off at a mad sprint back down the servants’ corridor.

There were balconies overlooking the grand halls down to the third floor, and they made passes around the palace’s main atrium in great, sweeping curves. He could have swung himself over the balustrade and dropped – pullingthe Bluejay’s latest stunt in a purposeful reverse – but even if the promise of broken ankles hadn’t forced his heart into his throat, the thought of not being fast enough did. He’d have to jump.

Alternis hit the fourth-floor balcony at an awkward diagonal, straddling the balustrade in a kind of way that would have hurt like the dickens had adrenaline not been coursing through his system a mile a minute. He swung himself over the railing with abandon, and teetered for just a moment on the edge of this balcony before launching himself at a spot on the floor below. This time, he hit his tailbone as he grabbed at a baluster mid-fall and pulled a kip over its railing, sliding on his bottom as he shook the dizziness from his head. He’d severely overestimated just how well one could perform parkour upside-down and hanging off of balconies, it seemed, and the jolts of pain shooting up his shins as he ran for the main spiral staircase came as dogged reminders of that hubris every time he took a step. There’d be time later, though, to be shaken. Now, Alternis was running, for his life and for the Pope’s.

 _And the Bluejay’s,_ he thought, as he hit the ground floor again. _Whoever the_ hell _she is._

Alternis found Agnès Oblige where the failed sniper had left her: shaking behind her podium, her mouth a thin line as security guards shepherded panicking gala guests out onto the grounds; Alternis was struck with the sudden, absurd thought that the only people they were really helping were the cleaners: if and when any other intruders opened fire, it might have been easier to conceal bloodstains on the red carpet. He considered voicing the thought –he’d read that humour, no matter how black, could diffuse situations (if not bombs). But instead Alternis turned a grim frown on Agnès, and offered his hand. “Your Excellency, please come with me. I’m going to get you to your security detail.”

“I-I . . . ” Agnès swallowed hard, and Alternis could see that her eyes were rimmed in red – though so far, her mascara had yet to smudge, either with tears or nervous sweat. “I don’t have one,” she was going on. Then she stiffened. “Mr. _Newman_?” she demanded, putting a harried face to a name. “What are you—”

“Ma’am, I’m not . . . him. I’m CIA. Now please—”

“Oi, Romeo!”

The Bluejay’s breath came in ragged bursts as she burst from the maintenance doorway behind the podium, and Alternis felt his heart catch as he noticed the deep red splatters across her arms and chest and bruising jaw.

“Sniper shit himself, then shot himself,” she panted, as she reached the podium – collapsing against it. “Your Excellency,” she went on, turning to the Pope, “I’m here from the . . . ”

Her voice trailed off, and even Agnès’ slackjawed terror was kicked into another gear as a single piercing scream rang out above the crowd, higher and louder and all the more _real_ than any Alternis had heard so far. He took off even before the Bluejay managed to croak out an order, weaving with that inner-city-kid sure-footedness through the churning crowd. Still, all the time in the world spent on Florem City streets did not give Alternis the powers of its native superheroes: he wasn’t the Flash or Superman, and when he stumbled to a halt on the threshold of the palace double doors, it was just in time to see a tumble of grey hair and drab suit get tangled between two more black-clad gunmen.

Tiz Arrior.

They’d already popped the trunk of one of the countless silver Bentleys open, and as Alternis watched the gunmen – the kidnappers – shove the Peace Prize laureate inside, it was impossible to see where man ended and car (and duct tape) began. All Alternis could think to do was blink, twice – to capture, with one half-functioning set of camera contact lenses, the licence plate of the car.

_“Chameleon, do you read me? We have a Code Blue.”_

“‘ _Blue_?’” echoed Alternis, fumbling for his comms. Blue was for cyber crimes and hackings, not SNAFUs with misidentified targets and underestimated terror threats. The protest was already forming on his lips when the Marshal’s voice crackled into his earpiece again, more frantic than he’d ever heard it before.

 _“The Commander had changed the details of the mission – and sent us the new ones in an E-mail, that got intercepted and deleted. Our IMINT agents weren’t on-site because they were never deployed._ MI6 _was supposed to send a team.”_

MI6 – the Eisenberg Secret Service’s foreign intelligence division. Alternis thought to the Bluejay, and her cool, could-I-have-a-spot-of-tea accent. Her last-decade Beretta. _She’s a Birdwatcher,_ Alternis thought, absurdly, _not a jay._ Though his mouth was dry, he swallowed hard before speaking into his mic again.

“They didn’t,” he whispered. “The only agent that made it here was—”

 _“Praline à la Mode’s body double,”_ finished the Marshal, with a crackling sigh. _“Her files had been sent to us from their officers, but it came from a different server than their IMINT details. We still haven’t recovered them – all we know is a name.”_ There was an awkward pause, and the static erupted with the sound of rustling papers. _“Lee. Edea Lee.”_

The Bluejay was stalking through the crowd toward him once more – though unlike Alternis, she didn’t need to dodge and weave. They parted before her: before those cold blue eyes and that bloodstained gown, and before that stony frown carved too deeply into a face that princess-pretty. Alternis felt his heart sink as the Marshal prattled on:

_“But did you secure the objective? Is the mark safe?”_

“The mark was never at risk. I, uh, have good news and bad news.” The latter seemed to far outweigh the formeras the pieces began falling into place. The Code Blue bringing down IMINT on either side of the operation meant that the two largest intelligence networks in the free world had been compromised – and been off the ball for _Crystals_ knew how long, if they hadn’t even managed to dispatch field operatives with the right targets.

If Alternis had been a praying man, he might have found the Pope, then. Made the sign of the Crystal across his chest and begged her for guidance. But he could only sigh. “The bad news is that the target was never at risk,” he began. The Bluejay’s cold eyes flicked to his as he spoke, and a silent recognition passed between them. Alternis knew that she’d be getting the same rundown from her superiors just about now, and that just like him, her heart must have been Bungee-jumping from her throat to the pit of her stomach. “A Mr. Tiz Arrior was marked instead, and kidnapped by unknown forces—”

“—and our only suspect took the bloody L before interrogation,” the Bluejay was saying into her own comms. Alternis rolled his lips.

 _“The good news, Chameleon?”_ the Marshal wanted to know. Alternis wasn’t even sure he could call it that, and he gave a shrug he hoped would translate to his shrinking voice.

“Well, I . . . I met Edea Lee.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> agents? secret. hotel? trivago


	2. Double-Oh

At five in the morning, the lobby of the Gathelatio Grand Hotel was all but empty, and shrouded in a cool blue darkness as the fading moonlight wrestled with the snow outside. The wheels of Alternis’ suitcase might have been oiled and – for once – gravel-free, but their rolling echoed off the polished marble floor and the cavernous walls, howling in dissonant harmony with the winter winds outside.

Granted, that might have been the headache talking. It was a doozy, for sure – the kind of _“doozy”_ that could only have been born of a sleepless night, a skipped dinner, and/or (this, Alternis was pretty sure, was the kicker) the sprawling bruise colouring the lantern line of his jaw. The Bluejay – _Edea,_ Alternis reminded himself – _hadn’t_ been screwing around. He’d allotted fifteen minutes before he left the hotel room for damage control, but there was neither enough time nor concealer in the world to keep that unseemly purple mark from peeking through. In the end, Alternis had settled for turning his coat collar up like a vicar’s, and winding his favourite sweater around his neck in lieu of a scarf.

He’d worn worse.

The bell on the front desk rang like a fire alarm, and the sound seemed to cast a javelin through his brain, for the stinging reverb it added to his headache. Alternis couldn’t help but wince. He’d not had much to drink at the gala: he never drank on the job if he could help it, and when appearances did dictate it, he’d take precautionary measures beforehand, and chug water afterward. Between the migraine and the turnout of the gala itself, though, Alternis figured now it was a wasted opportunity. At the very least, he might have cleared out the hotel minibar – the hangover couldn’t really be worse than this, and the room was on the Agency’s (fraudulent) tab, anyhow.

The clerk who finally dragged herself to the desk looked about as alive as he did, and Alternis decided to take that as a good sign. Between assignments, he’d learnt to internalise the role of the _“Little Grey Man:”_ the inconspicuous, run-of-the-mill background character. The Grey Man smiled when everyone else did, frowned when everyone else did – no later. He ate what they ate, drank what they drank. And he looked just as thrilled to be at the hotel front desk at the crack of dawn as anyone would have.

“Can I help you?” the young woman wanted to know. Alternis noted with some interest that though Crystmas wasn’t for weeks, she wore red and green earrings, and a festive crystal amulet under the starched collar of her shirt. Given her inch-long nails and her blue-dyed hair, he didn’t think it was for religious reasons, either – so he wasted little time in turning up all the charm he could muster.

“Actually, you can,” Alternis crooned, and paused – so she would think that he was _thinking_ of innuendos, but electing not to say them. Customer service was _such_ a game of chess for a field agent. “I’ll be checking out a bit early.”

“Understood. Could I have your room number?”

“Why, of course.” Alternis told her, and feigned polite disinterest as she clacked, clacked, clacked away at a sticking keyboard. But as seconds dragged into minutes, Alternis felt his blood begin to run cold. She was taking too long – and on _that_ topic, where was _Edea_? They’d agreed to meet at dawn, but he was holding down the fort here all on his own.

It was sooner rather than later that Alternis’ lower lip found its way under his teeth, and he bit down hard, willing the fogginess in his head and of the morning to dispel.

Finally, the clerk looked up with a crooked smile. “Beauregard Hansom?” she asked, grinning. Alternis tried for a smile, and felt it come across as a grimace. _Yes,_ he thought, _because “Vladimir Draw-Attention-To-Myself” was already in use, by another agent._ He longed, sometimes, for the simplicity he’d see in old spy movies: million-dollar shadow syndicates that made fake passports rain for the agents. At the Agency, there were only so many identities to go around.

It came as a relief to Alternis as the clerk finally settled into a wintry efficiency, her mouth a thin (and blissfully silent) line as he slid her his key and credit cards, and she shoved the stack of bills at him. He found himself slumping down in his coat as he worked his way through them, channelling his Grey Man reactions – mostly just rolled eyes – on autopilot. He’d even been sure to reject the pen she offered him for his own: monogrammed with his fake initials. It was pocket litter, one of countless nicknacks to make a legend all the more believable. Even if civilians would never notice them, those little details made all the difference to an agent. Alternis knew he, at least, felt safer hiding behind Beauregard Hansom’s man-purse, and his all-around air of being someone who owned monogrammed pens.

Maybe it was this slow security that sent him turning away from the front desk without a second glance – and the sharp sting of it being broken that made his heart skip a beat as the clerk called out once more, her voice cool.

“Mr. Hansom? Forgive me, but . . . you have a _week_ left of your stay. May I ask why you’re leaving _so_ early?”

 _Because Operation Crystal Ball was a complete bust, and we have to regroup._ Alternis pressed his lips together and turned around slowly, trying on excuses with a desperation as he searched for one that fit. A round of nervous laughter and shaky, seesawing syllables were ready, of course, tugging at the base of his throat – but _“um”_ s were dangerous.

“It’s a family matter,” Alternis finally decided, giving her Beauregard Hansom’s rigor mortis smile. “My sister said she’d be collecting me today.”

“Where is she, then?”

Alternis knew – better than most, actually – that murder was illegal. Really, he did. But tension crackled through his tired bones and aching jaw as he stared the poor clerk down, and his ribs felt like they were made of lead, pressing down on his lungs until his breaths came out ragged and hissy. “She’s—”

“Oi!”

“—She’s right here,” said Alternis, stiffly letting the breath he’d been holding free. He fixed the clerk with an arch look, and turned it on Edea Lee as she stomped up to him, silently willing her to play along. “Nice of you to finally show, _sis_.”

Edea’s eyes flashed, and Alternis watched something hard and mean flit across the planes of her face – though she quickly schooled her features into a closemouthed smile. “ _Killer_ traffic,” she drawled back. Alternis remembered her voice as high, but Luxendarc valley-girl accent she choked out for the show bordered on shrill: the kind of shrill that threatened to either hard-boil his aching brain, or send it dribbling down his nose. “So we’d best get going.”

“It was nice meeting you,” lied Alternis to the clerk. Edea was more succinct.

“Yeah, good-freaking- _bye.”_

“What happened in there?”

Their walk around the corner had been a silent one, shrouded in a tension Alternis felt was almost as frosty as the actual frost slicking the pavement – if only so much harder to melt. It was only Edea’s ire, popping like a firecracker, that managed to break it, and Alternis saw the line of her shoulders tense with her every word. He couldn’t help but scowl as they flung open the doors of either side of the rental car, and she kicked long legs up on the dashboard as she glowered at him. “Engaging with a civilian? Really?”

“You were the one who was late,” he reminded her. “By _ten_ minutes.” His own legs were crossed neatly at the ankle, and his spine ramrod-straight even as he fumbled with the keys and the ignition. “Where were you, Edea?” Alternis wanted to know, going for a wide-eyed kind of inquiry – swapping out Beauregard Hansom’s stuffy aura for one that said, _“I’m not mad, just disappointed.”_

Edea, for her part, just arched an eyebrow. Alternis couldn’t help but think how much prettier she was without the heavy makeup and fake nose she’d worn as Praline’s double – but an angry flush was knitting between the freckles dotting her high cheekbones, and her blue eyes were narrow as ever. “I went for a _run_ ,” she said, slowly, gesturing at her outfit: head-to-toe black Lycra. “A rough night is no excuse to skimp on training . . . and after last night, we both know _some_ of us need the cardio.”

A comeback had formed on Alternis’ lips before he could stop himself, and his knuckles were white around the stick shift. “It’s only ‘cardio’ if you have a _heart_ , Little Miss Practically-Punctual-in-Every-Way.”

“Oh, a _Mary Poppins_ joke? Who’s callous now?”

 _Still you,_ thought Alternis, as he brought his foot down on the gas. _That was just topical._

The streets of Gathelatio were an Impressionist visage outside their tinted windows, a blur of dappled blues and whites and snow-softened corners. Edea, Alternis was relieved to find, had been lying to the clerk – traffic was minimal, and the few brightly coloured Beetles they did pass seemed eager to give the rented Range Rover a wide berth as they gunned down the highway. Even with a foreign agent in the shotgun seat and tension building like an aneurysm at the base of his tired brain, Alternis hadn’t felt quite so calm in a while. Really, everything was fine – great, even – so long as he didn’t think about Operation Crystal Ball, or Tiz Arrior being kidnapped, or the Agency being hacked . . .

He could have wept when the phone finally rang, if he hadn’t been sure Edea would have had something to say about it. Instead, keeping one hand on the wheel, he pressed his cell into Edea’s waiting hand, and straightened as she put it on speaker.

“Wandsworth sperm bank,” she drolled. Alternis whirled on her, and though a reproach was ready on his lips, he felt them stretch into a shocked smile instead. Edea’s face carefully, craftily was impassive as she went on. “You squeeze it, we freeze it. How may I direct your call?”

Her eyes were dancing as a cool voice rattled over the line, explaining, in a clipped Eisenberg accent just like hers, that he’d _“like to request a special set of magazines for my visit.”_ Alternis, for his part, was doubled over the wheel, and his breaths were coming in half-startled hiccups. _Is_ that _their parole?_ he wondered, and couldn’t quite be sure if there was a good answer to that question. A parole – a coded phrase an agent would volley to an outsider to determine their allegiance – was supposed to be succinct and discreet. Last he checked, Alternis sure MI6’s best and brightest discussing spunk over _his_ Blackberry met neither of those criteria.

Still, it was the situation at hand, and Alternis swallowed hard as the man on the line turned his attention on him. He introduced himself as Agent Argent Heinkel, Edea’s handler – _“Or ‘case officer,’ as you say in the ‘States!”_ – and it took him three more off-colour jokes until he seemed to understand Alternis would not be biting. By then, Edea’s face had wrinkled with a scowl, and Heinkel’s voice was flat . . . and Alternis was finally sitting straight. Espionage was no place for humour, in his opinion. He didn’t need a rejected _Seinfeld_ script to tell him that the Agency’s Kustra Archipelago safe house would be the joint base of operations for both organisations, or that his own Marshal and _“case officer”_ would be waiting for them there.

“Heinkel was just trying to be nice, you know.”

Alternis twisted his tongue into his cheek, doing his best to mask any emotions as he turned on Edea. “Was he, now?”

“Mmm. And he doesn’t bust out the quasi-human conversational skills for just anyone.” Edea’s voice was hot, now, and Alternis watch the round line of her jaw harden at an angle as she clenched it. “Working with the CIA’s come as a shock to us. He’s . . . ” She splayed her hands, though the gesture was anything but hapless. “He’s trying his best.”

 _Are_ you _, though?_ Alternis had to wonder. Still, when that snowy silence fell once more, Alternis found he half-missed the sound of her voice.

Janne Balestra was a lot of things, and Alternis was hardly prepared to say most of those things in front of polite (or really just human) company. But he was also the closest Alternis had to a friend, which was why he pulled a grin as he bore it: the bone-crushing hug _“hello”_ and the hard slap on the back, which his agent’s instincts told him was a little more sincere. When Janne pulled away, his dark hair was wild, and his left eyebrow was mussed, tufts of hair sticking up at odd angles.

“Thank Crystals you’ve come back alive,” he told Alternis, and gave a don’t-really-mean-it kind of chuckle. “I’d bet our spooks down in Cyber that you would. Had a lot of money riding on you.”

Alternis allowed himself a mocking grimace. “I’m not exactly worth it, Janne, but I appreciate the gesture.”

Janne’s grin was wolfish, and he jut his head toward Edea, who was still leaning against the hood of the Range Rover. “Hey!” he called to her. Janne, Alternis knew, fancied himself the Crystals’ gift to both men and women, and it was that pompous confidence he liked to channel when playing characters like Beauregard and Ringabel. Then again, he’d seen how well Edea had taken to _those_ legends. Alternis felt his grin stretch to knowing corners as Janne pressed on. “Hey,” he was saying again. “You’re the MI6 chick, aren’t you?”

“And if I am?” Even from the other end of the driveway, Alternis could see Edea roll her eyes. Janne would not be deterred.

“We’ve heard a lot about you, is all. So do you have a name, or what?”

“I might,” sniffed Edea. She took her time pushing away from the car, crossing the driveway with slow, deliberate steps. When she reached the two of them, Alternis was shocked to see her flash him a smirk, before turning back on Janne. “But you can call me _Agent_.” For a moment – the splittest of seconds – Alternis saw her face come to life with a real smile, crooked and carefree. Then she thinned her lips, and it was gone. “I’ll be waiting inside, Alternis,” she said. “We have work to do.”

Janne watched her go with a stony frown. “So,” he asked, once Edea had disappeared inside the safe house’s low door, “I’m guessing you and Dickless van Dyke there are already thick as thieves.”

“Hardly,” Alternis assured his friend. “She just dislikes you more than she does me.”

Rumour had it that the Agency had a safe house in every capital city of every country in the world. If that were true, Alternis struggled to comprehend where their government black-money budget found the room to pay the electricity bills. The Kustra Archipelago safe house was a sprawling sort of manor, which had the general air of having been designed by someone who’d heard of houses, but never actually seen one. The roofing ranged from thatched straw to brick shingles, and the red paint on the sidings – traditional, the Marshal liked to say, for Eternian houses – was chipped in more places than it was solid. Inside, though, was a different story. The walls of the lobby were a patchwork of TV screens and computer monitors, showing news coverage from around the world, and a lattice of fluorescent lights criss-crossed the ceiling. Those, Alternis tried to avoid. With the weak tan of his complexion and the cornsilk-white of his hair, he really was dependent on natural lighting to keep him from looking too cadaverous.

“Hey, Romeo. Check this out.”

Alternis considered protesting the nickname, but he came to Edea’s side silently, and followed her gaze to one of the larger screens on the wall. The monitor was open to an Eternian national newspaper’s page, and Edea was scrolling through it with fervent abandon.

“Not a single mention of Tiz Arrior being kidnapped,” she said slowly, eyes never leaving the screen. “‘Gala attacked,’ ‘Pope Oblige a terror target . . . ’ but so far none of the sites have reported on what actually happened.”

“And the press was swarming the gala, too.” Alternis couldn’t help but frown, and the furrow digging into his brow seemed to press all the way into his skull. “So whoever we’re dealing with, they’ve got an in with world media.”

Edea pressed her head into her hands, and gave a rueful laugh. “So much for small-scale, domestic crime. I mean, really, are all the bad guys millionaires these days?”

Alternis had to laugh, too. When he caught his reflection in the screen, gone black in standby, he saw his smile cut at pin corners, his eyes heavy-lidded and only half-focused – but he looked alive, at least, and he decided he’d consider it a win. “Come on,” he said instead, nodding to Edea. “Let’s get to debrief.”

Alternis found the Marshal in the sunroom, and though he knew full well that the man had arrived at the safe house via the Agency’s very worst helicopter not two hours prior, he didn’t think it showed. The Marshal’s long hair fell in an unbroken blond curtain to the lapels of his immaculate suit, and his goatee was neatly trimmed, blocking his head from the rest of the room at harsh right angles. The only evidence Alternis could see that the room had been lived in at all – that the Marshal wasn’t just a particularly insistent bit of new-wave furniture – was the chess set on the desk in front of him, pawns just slightly out of line, and—

“Crystals, but it’s _freezing_ in here.”

—And the way the Marshal’s sharp eyes went wide as Edea stomped into the room.

Alternis turned slowly to face his new partner, watching in a fascination he knew was ill-disguised as her jaw went ever so slightly slack, and as her shoulders – already tense – shot up to her ears. On the other side of the room, the Marshal’s craggy face was carefully composed, but Alternis could see emotions warring in his grey-blue eyes. That, he was pretty sure, was a sign of the apocalypse. The Marshal wasn’t supposed to _have_ emotions.

All was still, for a moment: even the snow sprinkling over the skylight seemed to take the cue to come back later. If Alternis hadn’t been able to hear his own blood rushing through his ears, he might have thought he was dead, if only for the moment. Instead, though, one thought kept hammering at the edge of his mind: _How do_ they _know each other?_

The Marshal was the first to fold, steepling his fingers and turning stiffly in his chair. It was a loud, scraping affair: Alternis didn’t suppose that the old leather armchair was one meant for turning. But it was enough to break the spell. Edea rocked back on her running shoes, and even Alternis let himself deflate in his rumpled button-down.

“Chameleon, welcome back to the safe house,” managed the Marshal, once he’d forced himself back around. “And Agent Lee, my deepest thanks to you and yours for agreeing to work with us.”

Edea arched her eyebrows. “A man has been kidnapped. Nobody had much choice.”

The Marshal was not a petty man, Alternis knew, but it was hard not to think of him as one when he pulled out his ledger, flipped loudly through it, and shot the two of them a chilly smile. “I see here your code name with MI6 is . . . _Medusa_?” He gave a suggestive pause. “Well, it’s no worse than what Agent Dim dubbed you yesterday.”

“Marshal!”

Alternis wasn’t quite sure what he wanted of his boss, but he knew that the wide-windowed room couldn’t afford to get much colder – nor could it stand up to Edea’s white-knuckled fists, which he could see shaking at her sides. Alternis felt like his tongue was made of cotton as he spoke, but he wove through the words anyhow. “Did you . . . receive our mission statements?”

“The ones you both sent _last night_? Yes, yes I did.”

 _Smooth, Dim._ Alternis tried for a Janne Balestra smile: all toothy artifice. “Sir, if you don’t have anything to debrief us with, I’d, er, request your permission to take Agent Lee on the rest of her tour. Introduce her to our on-site team.”

“You have the training room booked for eleven AM” was all the Marshal had to say to that. Alternis turned on Edea, trying for the smile again, but she was already out the door.

She might not have known where she was going, but Edea moved on a beeline down the narrow hallways of the safe house, hugging corners and swerving security cameras by what must have been a second nature. This far north, and this early in the morning, the house was still shrouded in darkness, and with her in all black, he rather felt as though he were dogging behind a wisp of shadow. Her choppy blonde ponytail, which gave an angry kind of bounce with her every step, felt like Alternis’ only real cue as to where she was going.

That ponytail nearly hit him across the face when Edea whirled on him, though, at the base of the staircase. “What do you want, James Blond?” she demanded, jabbing her finger into his chest. When Alternis’ only answer was to thin his lips, Edea tried again. “I _don’t_ need you defending me,” she snarled.

 _So you’re a big girl now, then, Medusa?_ The thought sprang into Alternis’ mind unbidden, and he willed it away with a deep, shuddering breath. “Don’t be stupid,” he told her, tightly. “You’re my partner on this case. If you mess with the Marshal, it spills out over me.” _And I can’t take that again._ “Besides,” he added, spreading his hands, “I don’t want us to be enemies, even if we did get a rough start. At the very least, I need backup for when we visit Cyber!”

The face Edea pulled at the thought of visiting Cyber rather made it look like Alternis had asked her to electrocute herself (perhaps by popping the padding of a water-bra into her electric contact lenses). For this, though, Alternis could hardly blame her. The cyber-intelligence wing of the Agency was rather overshadowed back home by their sibling organisation of the NSA. The barebones team that had flown up to Eternia when Operation Crystal Ball had been blown was far from their best. It was rather the dynamic duo of Victor Court, who wore his governor father’s suits and a permanent sneer, and Victoria Stein, who was always yelling – whether into her gaming headset or at the world around her, though, Alternis was never quite sure. When Edea introduced herself to them, she’d gotten a crumpled Red Bull can thrown at her for her troubles.

It took more self-control than Alternis might have hoped not to lunge after the offending projectile. He hadn’t had any coffee yet, and even the dregs of someone else’s Red Bull was preferable to the way his eyelids stuck together when he blinked.

The training room hadn’t changed much since the last time Alternis had been there, and it was one of those places he rather supposed never would. It had been built in the skeleton of the manor house’s wine cellar, with dummies propped up against old barrels and heavy-bags hanging from the vaulted stone ceilings. It was the kind of place that would still have seemed empty if crawling with a hundred brawling people; one of those places where time didn’t pass (unless you were in a choke-hold). Edea busied herself quickly with the labyrinthine racks of weapons, and Alternis was content to let her roam free as he picked his way over the worn floor to his old locker, shrugging on his dusty Spandex.

When Alternis finally found the old hologram projector, he was half-surprised to see Edea had taken to the ring in silence, cracking out her joints with a businesslike focus. “That’s bad for your bones, you know,” he told her, but her only reply was a sharp _“Hi-yah!”_ as the first wave of projected fighters began creeping toward the map.

And so training began. Alternis moved on instinct to stand at Edea’s back, and she moved silently to accommodate him, whirling to deflect and block as he fell into a pattern of lightning-quick jabs and kicks. For his part, Alternis was sure to keep pressing forward, and force his weight low: keeping his target small not for those potential attackers, but for Edea, who worked tirelessly on the defence. The sweeping haymakers and roundhouses he’d thought so uncontrolled during their brief brawl at the gala seemed to Alternis now to take on a whole new light; Edea might have been wild, but she was also untouchable.

Granted, they were also punching holograms. If they’d stopped moving entirely, the faint blue lights would still have flickered out once they crossed the twenty-metre threshold. The training exercise was one the Marshal liked to remind new partners was intended merely for strangers to learn to fight alongside one another – but ten minutes in, Edeaseemed to have had enough. Pushing a damp lock of hair from her forehead, she tumbled from the ring of blue mats at the centre of the room, and – after fumbling with it for a minute – turned the projector around, so that the holograms played idly against the wall.

Alternis fixed her with a quizzical look, and she folded her arms. “This is stupid,” she decided. “What are the odds we actually end up in a fistfight out in the field, anyway?”

“We were locked in one not twenty-four hours ago,” Alternis pointed out. He jut his chin toward her, and tapped lightly on the bruise she’d left him. “Remember this shiner?” he asked, when Edea only stared blankly. She either didn’t, or didn’t care. Instead, she stalked to the door, footsteps echoing through the room in that way an agent’s never should have.

“I’m off to get some real training in,” she crowed. “You coming?”

Alternis’ headache had never really dissipated: it had been stewing at either end of his temples and needling at his neck all day, flaring with every word spoken around him and crumpling into something hard and pokey under the tension shrouding the safe house. He was beginning to think of his brain as something of an egg. At any given moment, someone would tap too hard, and it would crack, dribbling goo and guts down his nose.

Somehow, _that_ mental image didn’t do much to alleviate his headache.

Edea had taken up residence behind the house, where the scruffy grass ran into the choppy sea of the archipelago itself. Given the way she drew her jacket up around her chin, fists balled tight, Alternis didn’t think she was there for the stark beauty of the great outdoors – rather, he followed her gaze to the line of targets on the far side of the island.

_“Bang!”_

Her gaze, that was, and her line of fire.

“Edea?” Alternis hazarded. There was a thin layer of snow over the dead grass of their lawn, and it was all he could do not to shuffle his steps, breadcrumbing back and forth – anything to cover the footprints. “Edea, what are you _doing_?”

“I told you,” she spat. She paused to fire two more rounds, and Alternis could just see the faraway target had three holes in a line down its centre: the head, the throat, and the stomach. All of them kill-shots, and all of them highly unnecessary.

“If either of us end up in a situation we have to shoot our ways out of, our cover will already have been blown,” said Alternis irritably. The targets at the edge of the lawn did not a real shooting range make, but still, his skin was crawling underneath his sweatshirt, and he thinned his lips to keep from biting at them. Edea didn’t even turn to face him as she volleyed back:

“Oh, because karate is so subtle?”

“You know that isn’t what I meant—”

If another shot, this one clipping the side of the cardboard cutout, was any indication, Edea wasn’t listening. “You know what I think?” she cooed, flashing a smile that didn’t meet her eyes. Alternis was all too aware of how close her finger was to the trigger – that the safety wasn’t on – that unlike her first handgun, the SIG Sauer didn’t have a convenient disassembly lever. “I think,” Edea went on, “I think you’re just a crap shot. Don’t want to be shown up by a girl, right?”

“It isn’t like that,” Alternis scrambled to assure her. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself lifting his hands out in front of him – Edea knew he was unarmed, but perhaps this was for his own benefit. It was with a deep, shaky breath that Alternis tried again. “Maybe we should get inside, all right? We can talk about whatever’s bothering you at lunch . . . ”

“Yeah,” said Edea, darkly, “definitely just playing chicken.” She turned stiffly on her heel as she fired her last bullet at the target, and stomped to the porch for another clip. Alternis watched her go, but he wasn’t seeing her. His mind was a jumble of images: yellow sand and black, black bloodstains, and the red lines drawn across the bodies of people who wouldn’t get up.

“ _Chicken,”_ Edea had said. Alternis felt like he was going to hurl.

But he didn’t. Instead, Alternis grit his teeth and placed a trembling hand on her tense shoulder, digging his fingers into her skin just hard enough to let her know he wasn’t messing around – just hard enough, he hoped, to shock her into stillness. “I asked what you were doing,” he said again, firmly. “You aren’t even supposed to be out here.”

“I’ll back off if you do,” sneered Edea. “Better yet, out-shoot me. Then we can leave this discussion behind us.”

 _She’s only trying to get a rise out of you, Dim,_ Alternis told himself. This time, the severity of his tone was one he hoped would help him get _himself_ under control – but his heart still pounded, and his mouth was dry. “I’m not picking up a gun, Lee.”

“Oh, you won’t, will you?” This time, when Edea whirled on him, her eyes were blazing. “Crystals, maybe I should go get Short-cock and Minecraft Holmes down in Cyber to go project some pictures of my _will to live_ over on those targets, then, since I know you’ve already shot _that_ in the balls!”

_Don’t rise to it don’t rise to it don’t._

“I mean, really, Alternis! You’re hotheaded enough to attack me and throw off my entire sting at the gala, but you’re too coward to shoot a piece of paper? I swear, I’m marching right back to your _Marshal’s_ office. I want a new partner—”

“Well, we don’t always _get_ what we want!”

Alternis heard his voice break on the words, if not the words themselves. He’d been clutching his fists with a whiteknuckled intensity, but his hands flew free as he threw them skyward, bearing down on Edea. “‘Cause,” he was saying, “‘cause if we did, then I wouldn’t be here, either, would I? No! I’d have the _real_ Praline à la Mode pressing her toy gun to my head as I went down on—”

“Er, guys?”

Alternis had read once, on the side of a cereal box, that if the world should ever stop spinning, the inertia would send every last organism living on it careening off into the void of space, like the water on a dishrag. He wasn’t quite sure where the metaphor ended and the dishrag-i-ness of the whole situation began, but Alternis knew he felt like he’d just been fired from the barrel of Edea’s handgun, and wrung out in midair, some cruel force of the universe hells-bent on squeezing all the fire out of him. He didn’t deserve it, after all.

“Down . . . _under_ ,” finished Alternis, lamely. “Yep, the Southern Hemisphere. That’s, uh, what we were talking about.”

Janne’s eyebrows were knit so heavily over his forehead they seemed one long, jagged line, and Alternis could see him shaking all the way up on the porch. “Ri-i-ight,” he said at last. “Well, I guess I’ll leave you to it. But, um, the Marshal’s given me instructions for the two of you. The getaway vehicle identified yesterday’s been spotted north of Gathelatio borders . . . ”

He seemed likely to prattle on like that, for a while, but Alternis wasn’t listening anymore. All he really registered was that he’d come toe-to-toe with Edea during their shouting match, and that the fire he expected to see flickering under her features was gone, replaced by a dull resignation. _She had it coming,_ Alternis told himself, but the words sounded hollow even in his mind.

Instead, he swallowed hard, and stepped back. “Down under,” he said again. It seemed as good a cover as any, and Edea scoffed into the hood of her jacket.

“I get the gist of it, _sub_ -i-califragilisticexpialidocious.” It was a good barb, but it lacked her usual verve, even as she rushed to add: “Nice save, though. Ever consider a career in freestyle rap?”

 _You’re an odd one, Edea Lee._ In the past twenty-four hours, he’d known her as the stand-in for a pop star, a terror threat, and a deadly fighter. All he saw now was a petulant child – but the upbraid dragged a slick, shiny sense of guilt behind it as it ran through his system. With his blood roaring in his ears and her image swimming in front of him, Alternis couldn’t bear to stand near Edea any longer. So he pushed away. “I’ll see you at the drop, then,” he told her, speaking vaguely of the mission Janne had detailed for them. “Don’t be late this time.”

“Nice wheels.”

Edea was leaned against the hood of an old sedan as though it were a vintage Stingray, and wore her tatty sweatshirt with the same confidence she had that awful prom dress. Still, when he drew closer to the curb, Alternis saw her shoulders were rolled forward behind the line of her crossed arms, and her lower lip was worn raw, its shadow blurry and misshapen in the dim light from the streetlamp. He couldn’t help but heave a sigh.

“Edea, I—”

“I asked the Marshal to take me off the mission.”

She spoke all in a rush, and for the second time that day, Alternis heard the way her cool voice flooded with emotions the second she let that brusque facade slip. But whereas her teasing laughter had made the whole world (except for a put-upon Janne) seem so much brighter, now Alternis couldn’t help but feel she was making the frigid city street just a little more cramped. He could only stare.

“What?”

Edea shrugged. “I asked my— uh, _him_ to take me off the mission,” she repeated. Alternis frowned.

“And what did he say?”

She gestured to the car behind her with a wry grin, and Alternis noticed – for the first time – the cameras lining the dashboard, and the night-vision goggles just visible in the front seat. “He told me to blow it out my ass,” said Edea, and all was silent for a moment before she broke into a fit of rueful laughter – though it faded once Alternis cracked a grin, too. Then, she bowed her head and took a breath so deep he feared she’d bob up and away.

“Alternis,” she began, once she’d composed herself, “I’m sorry. I’ve been out of line today, and I let personal issues stand in the way of the mission, and . . . ” She splayed her hands. “And, well, I was a dick.”

 _You weren’t._ The protest had formed instinctually on Alternis’ lips, but he bit it back: he didn’t mean it. Instead, he inclined his head and rolled his lips, schooling that don’t-shoot-me voice in the back of his mind to something more reasonable. “It’s okay,” he told Edea. “We all have off days.”

“But—”

“Look,” said Alternis, and he tried for a smile. A real one, this time. “Let’s just . . . start over, okay?” The thin layer of snow on the asphalt crunched beneath his feet as he worked his way over to Edea, extending a hand. “Agent Alternis Dim, CIA. Codename Chameleon.”

“Agent Edea Lee, MI6,” said Edea, laughing softly. “Codename Medusa.” She took his hand warmly, but Alternis pulled back, flashing a mocking frown.

“Hold up,” he began, before hazarding, “Wandsworth sperm bank. You squeeze it . . . ”

Her face lit up with that crooked grin again, right on cue. Alternis couldn’t help but smile back. “I’d like to request a special set of magazines for my visit,” she rattled off. “Got any back issues of Anaemic Blond Superspies Weekly?”

“Mm, very funny, Lee.”

Their laughter faded easily into an easy silence as they swung into the sedan, Edea ceding Alternis the driver’s seat to strap herself into a set of night-vision goggles, and Alternis flicking absentmindedly through the radio stations until he found one they could both croon along to. Nights like these – nights where he was cooped up in safety, gathering harmless information, nights where he didn’t have to wonder who the good guy was – well, they were really the reason he stayed with the Agency. (That, of course, and his utter lack of real-life skills: Alternis had never gone to university.) So it was with a lighter heart and a clearer head than he’d had all day that Alternis pressed his foot to the gas, guiding them silently down the Gathelatio streets their intel told them Tiz Arrior’s kidnappers had driven not hours before.

Alternis supposed he ought to have known better.

They’d put an all-points on the kidnappers’ too-fancy towncar when Alternis had first processed its plates, and according to the Marshal, it had been the local police – so much more efficient in Eternia than the ‘States – who’d first located it, at a suburban warehouse ill-suited to its silvered class. The traffic had been thin and the cloud cover thinner as their sedan had drifted silently down the winding roads, and just then, with his knuckles white on the wheel, Alternis remembered thinking how stupid their adversaries must have been to park themselves in such a conspicuous place.

But when they’d rounded the corner to the warehouse, they weren’t met with just one silver Bentley, but a garage full of them: it seemed that every car that had been taken to the gala the night before had either been stolen by or in cahoots with the strangers who’d taken Tiz Arrior. That, though, could be the police’s problem. What sent Alternis’ heart rocketing up into his throat, cutting his breaths off at those too-short, too-familiar intervals, was the muzzles of countless machine guns, all leveled at the windshield of a car that was in no way bulletproof.

 _They knew we were coming,_ thought Alternis, swallowing hard. His hands threatened to slip right off the steering wheel as they trembled against its surface. _It was a trap._

He didn’t know how long he sat there, frozen – but in an industry where missions were made in microseconds, though, the world never stood still for long. Even so, it seemed like all the events to follow never actually happened: rather, they happened so quickly that Alternis could only process them in the past tense.

But as it was, Edea wrenched his hands from the wheel and kicked him hard in the shin, and she scrambled over him into the driver’s seat as he jerked his leg back reflexively. It was all Alternis could do to stay upright as he wriggled from under his seatbelt into the safety of the back seat, and only as he hit his head against the window that he finally turned around to see the white repairman’s van careening down the streets behind them.

“Edea!” cried Alternis, but she was already on it, tense as a coiled spring as she yanked the stick back and pushed it forward again. The sedan moved— _No,_ thought Alternis, it _swung_ in a wild circle as Edea slammed it into reverse, stopping just shy of running the first gunman into that parade of stolen cars. She whipped out of the window closest to her as soon as it was open, and in the time it took Alternis to take a breath that reached anywhere close to his lungs, Edea had her pistol out and ready.

 _Idiot,_ thought Alternis – but the guards in the warehouse’s garage were still in shock, scrambling under their broken ranks, and Edea was nothing if not an opportunist. _“Bang! Bang!”_ The tiny handgun wouldn’t have done much at their range against adults in Kevlar, but Edea wasn’t aiming for them: instead, Alternis watched out of the corner of his eye as one, two, three cars sank forward on popped tires.

“Move, move, move!”

Alternis could feel his blood tearing at the paper-thin edges of his veins, but he’d kicked himself into gear. With Edea half-hanging out of the window, there was just enough room for him to slide back into the driver’s seat, willing his hands steady as he rested them on the wheel once more.

“Are you ready?” he couldn’t help but ask his partner. In the rearview mirror, he watched as she tumbled into the backseat, fists clenched tight.

“ _Hell_ yes,” she said, grimly. “Floor it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i miss all the kids being friends. not just in bravely, but, like, in general


	3. Secret Services

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one is a little violent so reader discretion is advised

“On your left!”

Alternis had grown up bouncing around the foster care system of inner-city Florem, and though he’d spend the odd month under the eyes of neglectful welfare enthusiasts or overzealous soccer moms, most of his formative years had taken place within the crumbling plaster walls of the Witherwood Home for Boys. He remembered quite little of those years – once he’d been old enough, Alternis had booked it to military school – but he did remember the SNES system tucked in the cabinet above their rickety old TV, and the way sometimes, when they could get the power on for long enough, the boys would take turns playing a game given to them by a donor. It was called _Super_ _Mario Kart_ , and revolved around different pixelated characters careening madly down treacherous roadways and shooting turtle shells at one another in order to ensure victory. For years, Alternis had thought his own tank-driving and motorcycling skills a far cry from those his ten-year-old self had spent hours honing back in Florem.

But it was not those patented junior cadet tricks that came flooding back to him now. No, as Alternis pushed last millennium’s sedan past twice the speed limit and ground down on the gas so hard he feared he’d burn through the car floor, he was all Princess Peach.

“ _My_ left, Alternis—”

“Edea, we have the _same left_! That _wasn’t_ the— ah, shit.”

Alternis could barely watch as their rental car’s sideview mirror was clipped neatly off its perch and sent rolling down the icy soil below. They’d long since veered off of the rambling suburban roads: now, Alternis was pushing the car after the ghost of that white van as it cut down a forest hiking trail, groaning over terrain neither vehicle was suited for. He’d never longed so fervently for a power-up: a blue shell, perhaps, or that one that turned your car into a bullet.

They were, funnily enough, out of bullets.

Alternis heard an earsplitting screech behind him as Edea wrenched her window open, letting a tree branch _“thwack!”_ into the car. He could just barely see her reflection in his own window as she popped her head out, but heard all too well as she let off a high-pitched string of curses. (Later, Alternis would think her language so much more colourful than just a _“blue streak.”_ Edea would not laugh.)

“They’re gaining on us!” she called, whipping back inside the car. When she shut her window again, it was with a _“crunch”_ Alternis doubted bode well for the rental fee. But he didn’t have time to dwell. He leaned over into the shotgun seat to look out the other side mirror, and sure enough, there they were: two sleek motorcycles, and two black-clad riders, weaving easily through the silver birch trees. He doubted either biker would be stupid enough to shoot while moving, but it was only a matter of time before they caught up to the poor sedan . . .

_Wait a minute._

They were never going to outrun their tails, Alternis knew. But maybe they didn’t have to.

Alternis had long since killed the taillights, which was why, he figured, he heard a muffled duet of harsh Eternian accents some ways behind him curse up a storm as he flicked them on again. Still, it wouldn’t buy them much time. With a mouthed _“Trust me!”_ to Edea, Alternis slammed the sedan into reverse, and kept his foot on the gas until he heard the growling engines of the tails’ motorcycles veer into silence. Then he hit the breaks, and he and Edea tumbled from the car.

“What are we— _mmph_!”

Alternis was quick to clap one hand over Edea’s mouth, and raise the other in a signal he hoped she’d interpret as _“wait.”_ He was relieved to feel her deflate behind him, and he saw her nod as he motioned to a trampled-looking bush at the side of the packed-dirt road. He’d been hoping to run the bikers into the woods. It was dumb luck they seemed to have shot off in the same direction.

It was Edea’s turn to signal at him, skin was ghostly-pale in the dim moonlight as she crossed her index fingers, and pulled them apart again. Alternis was half-surprised to see it. The gesture was an old Agency signal, one he knew MI6 agents would have performed by linking pinkies, or yelling intently. Then again, he was willing to wager Edea was smart enough not to risk her instructions getting lost in translation. So he moved.

The bikers had landed at the foot of a pine tree almost a hundred metres from the dirt path they’d veered off of, and they were sitting ducks when Alternis and Edea burst from the underbrush on either side of them. Muscle memory took over as Alternis wove through the manoeuvre, one he’d learned in the Academy to pry passengers from the front seats of a car. It worked just as well now. Edea dove at the one biker’s neck as Alternis kicked the other in the chest, and grappled him to the ground. The fight was over before it began.

“I don’t suppose you know how to ride one of these?”

Edea indicated the abandoned motorcycles with evident distaste, before returning to the man she held in a sleeper hold, who crumpled quickly in her arms. Alternis gave his own biker one last good thump on the back, pulled the keys from both bikes, and flashed Edea a halfhearted grin.

“Hold on tight.”

Her arms had barely closed around his waist before Alternis slammed down on the gas, and it was all he could do not to let out a whoop of appreciation as they wove through the trees. _This is more like it,_ he found himself thinking. This was real speed. Real _grace_. Real—

“Crystals-Dim-I-swear-I’ll- _kill_ -you!”

Edea’s words came out in chattering bursts, and each one sent her chin digging deeper into Alternis’ shoulder. Despite the pain, and the way he felt her clutch drive all the way through his solar plexus, Alternis could only grin like a madman as he leaned all the way forward over the handlebars. Their sedan had crapped out just around a hundred kilometres per hour. The bike pushed twice that, and had the capacity, Alternis knew, to double even that number.

Hearing Edea squeal through the whipping wind and breakneck speed was just an added bonus.

“I see the van!”

It was the first clear sentence Edea had made it through since they’d stolen the bike, and so Alternis knew it was serious. Slowly – though it almost pained him to do so – he began to ease up on the throttle, and followed her pointing finger to the dirt road, which had begun to widen again as the trees began to thin. Too quickly, Alternis felt his elation sour on his tongue, and his stomach began to churn against the dinner he’d only half-eaten. They were losing cover, and fast.

“Do you want to do something crazy?”

Edea had kept one hand on Alternis’ chest, and it balled into a fist at his words, pressing hard into his sternum. “Depends,” he heard her choke out, painting desperately over her earlier panic with a slick coat of charm. “Does it get me off this bike?”

“That it does.”

“Then I’ll do just about anything.”

 _Do you trust me?_ Alternis almost asked, but he bit his tongue at the last minute. Trust was a luxury in their line of work – as were the nanoseconds it would have taken for him to force out the sentence. Instead, he grit his teeth. He didn’t dare move an inch, lest his hand brush the front brake or risk whiskeying the throttle, and his whole plan go up in smoke. Instead, Alternis barked his plan to Edea in sharp bursts, and felt her grow tense behind him, her hands cold against his chest.

“One of us is going to die, doing this,” she stated flatly, “and I’m not sure which of us I’d rather it be.”

“Are you ready?” Alternis wanted to know. To his surprise, Edea lifted her head from his shoulder to let out a terse peal of laughter.

“As I’ll ever be!”

They’d come to a parallel with the van, and Alternis had halved their speed in a matter of seconds – but now he poured it on once more. The acceleration was necessary to getting Edea off the bike. Whether or not he’d stay on was a different story.

Still, Alternis had a plan, and he’d been trained well enough to know to stick to it . . . for at least as long as it remained the only one they had. As the bike shot out of the trees and onto the trail, Alternis dropped them into a hard right turn, and he felt the muscles in his legs burning as he squeezed the bike tightly with his thighs and slammed down on the back brake. That alone wouldn’t be enough to stop the bike, but Alternis wanted the weight off the front wheel – even now, as they dipped so low, so close to the road, that Alternis could have lain his face down on the dirt.

 _That is, if I wanted to_ lose _my face._

They were sixty-odd metres away from the faint yellow pools of the van’s headlights, with just seconds left to be invisible. If he’d had the time, Alternis might have sworn – or said a prayer, or begged Edea’s forgiveness. But he didn’t. Instead, he pulled a hairpin turn once more, and the bike rocked unsteadily on its tires as their perpendicular lean shot into a beeline straight for the van.

And then Alternis hit the brakes.

_“SLAM!”_

The road was not so icy, nor firmly packed, that their stunt didn’t hit it: indeed, Alternis had seen the bike spraying snow the entire way through the woods, and a cloud of dust and frost had erupted from below their front wheelas it had jerked to a too-rapid stop. But even through all of it, Alternis could just see a small, pale figure tumble onto the roof of the van, hanging onto the luggage rack for dear life.

 _You’re next, Romeo._ It was Edea’s voice that came to him then: Alternis doubted his own would have made the cue. As much as he’d loved that bike, he wasted little time in releasing his hold on the handlebars – over which the brakes had so ardently tried to throw him, as they’d done his partner – and launching himself to the side, falling into an ungainly tumble to the side of the road.

“Alternis!”

Edea was flat on her stomach on the top of the van, still speeding along behind him – though it would not be behind him for long. Alternis bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, and he didn’t let go until he felt his mouth flood with the coppery tang of blood. Then he burst into a mad sprint. Edea was reaching both hands out to him, now, and he could see her eyes were wide. Soon, she’d have passed him. Would he even make it? Was he going to die? Was—

Alternis leaped.

Edea’s hands clamped hard down around his wrists, and Alternis could feel every sit-up he’d ever done as he kicked hard against the wall of the van, fighting desperately to keep himself upright as Edea pulled him up. He landed on top of her in a heap of long limbs and scraped skin, and Alternis found himself grasping her fingers tightly, desperate for an anchor. Literally.

“Are you okay?” Edea’s voice was breathless as she wriggled out from underneath him, but Alternis barely registered it. The wind had raised tears along his waterline, and they’d long since frozen on eyelashes that scraped at his browbones as he blinked.

“I can’t believe that worked!”

“It hasn’t yet,” protested Edea. But she was grinning, and as her chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, Alternis imagined he could see her heart pounding just as his did. “Come on,” she went on, “let’s do this.”

Those were famous last words.

Alternis had just dropped down over the back doors of the van, ready to kick through the window, when they swung open of their own accord. The back of the van was crammed so tightly with black-clad guards they looked like beetles: all dark glistening carapaces and flickering gazes, and controlled, crawling, movements as they closed ranks around their cargo.

But from above, Alternis could still see him. And though his salt-and-pepper hair might have been worse for wear and his nondescript face gaunt with a terror Alternis thought only he’d ever known, there was no mistaking Tiz Arrior.

The van came to a groaning halt as the dirt road began breaking into gravel, but little else was still. Alternis kept his legs wrapped tightly around the neck of one guard as he moved to help Edea from the roof, and she cleared two more with a tumble of a roundhouse kick, sending them sprawling to the road below as she wobbled into her balance. Alternis wished he had the luxury of such a break. The figure below him was struggling to pry his legs from their neck, and Alternis saw little reason to remain seated: he drove a kick into their sternum and brought them both down in a heap, though not before driving the last of his force into their carotid artery. There was little like a good sleeper hit to keep someone off your back, he knew—

_“Crash!”_

—except for perhaps a concussion. Alternis watched as Edea spun the guard she held in a chokehold of her own around, slamming their head into the metal of the van door. Before they’d even hit the ground, she’d spun on her heel to kick another assailant across the jaw, and dropped low to hit them in the solar plexus as they crumpled – making sure they stayed down, if only for the moment. Alternis felt his heart in his throat. In the split-second reprieve that came of taking three fighters down, Alternis could see that twice that number were poised at the door to the van.

And though it was dark, he could also see how what little light there was glinted off the odd rectangle at the level of the guards’ hips.

“ _Medusa_!” Alternis called, careful to use her codename now that they were locked in an active situation. Edea seemed on it already as she backed toward him. “They’re armed—”

“—But lightly,” she finished. It was true: nobody in the van was packing anything heavier than a handgun. “They’re expecting backup.”

“Eyes to the skies,” he warned her. It was the only possible outcome. Though the road was wider, now, it had been challenge enough for their adversaries to bring one cargo vehicle through the woods. But Edea had moved on.

“That can be your job!” she yelled. The second wave of fighters had begun to trickle from the trunk, and before either could move to draw those tiny pistols, Edea swept the legs out from one of them, and popped up to use their ribs as a springboard to get her legs around the throat of the second. She wrenched, hard. Alternis could swear he heard a _“crunch.”_

“You get Tiz,” she panted, tossing one gun into the woods and clenching the other in her fist. “I’ve got these guys.”

Someone screamed as Alternis ducked into the van – it might have been him. The air, already stormy with the grunts and crashes of a hand-to-hand brawl, was coming to life with the sound of gunshots: tiny thunderclaps that made Alternis feel like his veins pumped lava, and sent leaden weight down the honeycomb cracks of his bones. He’d read once that even the most experienced swimmers – even aquatic _animals_ , like seals or turtles – went into a cold kind of shock when they first hit the water. He wondered if it applied to being yanked out of any element.

But even though his mouth tasted like copper, and his head swam, Alternis swallowed it down. Tiz’s eyes were glassy when Alternis met them, but he could see even in the murk that his jaw was clenched under the duct tape slapped across his mouth. That, Alternis would have to leave. He could hardly do with screaming. Instead, Alternis flipped Tiz onto his stomach and fished the other motorcycle’s keys – the ones from the bike they hadn’t taken – and began using them to saw through the tape at Tiz’s ankles. He’d just made it through, keys hitting the corrugated metal floor with a _“clink!”_ when he heard it: the telltale click of a gun being cocked.

Alternis didn’t have the time to think. He threw himself backwards in a somersault, and he kept his eyes screwed shut until he felt himself connect with something hard and fleshy behind him. Blindly, he fumbled for what felt like an arm, and snapped it hard over his knee as he came to a stand. Sure enough, a guard lay at his feet. Alternis picked them up by the back of their collar, and slammed their forehead down into the threshold of the van’s back doors.

“Medusa,” he hazarded again, “what’s—”

“Cute codename.”

Tiz Arrior’s guards had been clad in black Kevlar from head to toe, but the man with his size-four-hundred work boot pressed on the back of Edea’s neck wore a denim vest over his plaid shirt, and a cigar hung from his lopsided mouth. He was the driver, Alternis supposed. He was built like a Sasquatch. Edea might have been good, but tired, there would have been no way she could take him down.

 _I should have been with her._ Alternis swallowed hard as he moved toward the giant keeping his partner down. “Easy does it,” he began, trying for a gruff tone.

The driver only grinned. His voice made Alternis’ _“gruff”_ seem prepubescent, and his eyes danced in the dim light. “I’d been wondering if Fascist Barbie came with a Ken.”

“Think a lot about children’s dolls, do you?” Alternis shot back. The air had been still, for a moment, a smattering of heartbeats – _one two_ , _one-two_ , _onetwo_ , came the pounding at his ribs, faster and faster. But it was stirring again. Somewhere beyond the treeline, a helicopter’s whirring blades were echoing through the night; soon enough, its searchlights cast a cold yellow glow over the road. As his eyes adjusted to the flash cutting through the gloom, Alternis could see Edea’s forehead bleeding from a scrape at her hairline, and both her eyes were swollen with newborn bruises. But they were also blazing with a silent fury – and flicking, forward and back, to a spot to the left of Alternis’ feet.

A gun.

If he’d been nauseous before, Alternis felt his instant ramen edging up his throat now, sour and scraping. His whole leg shook as he crossed one step in front of the other, moving carefully down the diagonal.

He saw no other choice.

The driver was gloating, now, boasting how men like him were the lynchpin of every job – and insisting he _“oughta get a contract for this.” He’s freelancing with them,_ thought Alternis. There was no hope of a hostage swap there . . . not that it had ever felt possible.

By now the helicopter’s blades had come to a tidal kind of roar, and they were spinning so quickly Alternis’ hair was whipping across his face. He didn’t need to look up to know that it was hovering right above them – to know any second, a ladder would be dropped, and the road would be overrun with guards. To know if he didn’t act soon, he’d be dead.

To know that Tiz was out of his grasp – but that he could still save Edea.

 _Crystals forgive me,_ thought Alternis, taking a shuddery breath. With every blink, memories came flooding into his mind; even before he closed his hand around the grip, he could feel the gunmental against his palm, even before he took aim, Alternis could see the barrel of the pistol reflected in the stranger’s eyes, face drawn in resigned terror.

_“Bang! Bang!”_

He longed to squeeze his eyes shut, but Alternis knew that wouldn’t help anyone. Instead, he fired: once through the man’s knee, to free Edea, and once through his eye. He didn’t stop to wonder if the driver would get up again. No, Alternis scrambled to help Edea up, and broke into a desperate run. His eyes were still wide open, and they were slick with tears.

“Tiz is still—”

Edea’s voice was hoarse, and it left little room for reproach, so Alternis decided he wouldn’t try. He just took Edea’s hand in his, and didn’t look back as he kept running. More than once, he felt his ankle twist, or his foot skid against the icy dirt, but it wouldn’t stop him. Nothing would.

He _had_ to get away.

When Alternis finally came to a stop, it was at the base of a fallen log, whose icy bark dug like a thousand knives into his spine. He welcomed the cold. Surrounded by the blurry silhouettes of countless gnarled trees and sunk deep in a field of soggy, dead grass, it was the only thing around him that felt truly real – and if he was lucky, Alternis figured the shock might even reach his heart, and wrench it up from the pit of his stomach.

But only the resounding crash of Edea tumbling through a dead bush really did that. Alternis saw himself move rather than felt it as he shifted to accommodate her: pulling his legs to his chest so she could stretch hers out. She did so with a groan even Alternis felt in his sternum. Even so, she offered a weak smile (though it warped quickly into a wince of pain).

“Thank you—” she began. Alternis shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said, firmly. “I . . . I don’t deserve that.”

“You saved my life,” Edea shot back. She turned to face him, and Alternis could hardly meet her gaze as she arched her eyebrows, narrowing her eyes. He had, in a way. Saved her life. But would she have saved his?

_Would I want her to?_

And besides: “I didn’t save _Tiz_.”

Edea was right on cue, though Alternis could hear her heart wasn’t in it. “I’m prettier, so saving my life is _worth_ more,” she tried to joke – but it rang hollow through their tiny clearing. She sighed, and this time, Alternis had no choice of looking away: Edea jabbed a finger at his chest, and she spoke with the kind of authority one had to be born with. “Alternis Dim,” she stated, “you were brave today. And we’re both better use to Tiz Arrior alive.” When Alternis didn’t splutter _immediately_ at her words, Edea brightened. This time, her smile stretched a little bit wider. “Now,” she steamrolled on, “do you want to see something that I _know_ will make you feel better?”

 _An L-pill?_ wondered Alternis. He might have gone for some cyanide, then: just a little bit. Edea reached wordlessly into her pocket, and pulled out a stack of last year’s Blackberry cell phones.

“I got their mobiles,” said Edea. “The driver’s, and two of the other guys’. I bet at least one of them is going to tell us how to . . . well, tell us what we need to know to make this right.”

Alternis had to crack a grin at that, and he let himself deflate, if just a little, against the log behind them. Edea’s thigh was brushing his, and the warmth of her touch was – all in all – decidedly more welcome against his skin than the icy barbs of the dead bark. “You’re good people, _Medusa_ ,” Alternis relented. Edea punched him lightly in the arm.

“Have I ever told you how I got that name?” she asked, after a beat. Alternis shook his head, and Edea shifted ever so slightly to face him. Her leg wasn’t touching his anymore, but her voice was warm as she pressed on. “Well, then,” she reasoned, “you get on the line with the Agency – get an all-points on all the airstrips and helipads this side of the North Sea, and ask for a rescue detail for us. And I’ll tell you all about my misspent youth. And . . . ” She splayed her hands at that. This close, Alternis could see those hairline cracks in her confident demeanour, see the way she struggled to come across as tough as she did. But she was trying.

“And we’ll live to see another day,” she finally finished. Alternis tried for a joke.

“Of course we were going to survive,” he countered. His tone was bitter, and he hoped his closemouthed smile offset it, if just a little. “Only the _good_ die young, remember?”

“Hey,” said Edea, “ _we_ are the good guys. Hell, we’re so _good_ , we’ll probably be dead by thirty.”

And with that comforting thought, Alternis settled in for the wait.

The safe house was no stiller than usual, even as the clock struck two AM: though the hallways remained about as lifeless as charcoal sketches, the screens dotting the walls were still a checkerboard of news sites and the Weather Channel, and every so often, Alternis would catch a glimpse of a shadow rounding a corner as yet another agent dragged themselves to the meeting the Marshal had called. He rather felt as though he were swimming upstream as he pushed down the halls, up the stairs – away from the sitting room, where the Marshal expected him. Even launching his stakeout clothes into the trash chute and a scalding-hot shower couldn’t clear the traces Alternis imagined lingering on his skin: invisible spatters of blood and the words traced through them, proclaiming him the worst kind of sinner, the worst kind of _person_.

 _“I promised myself I’d never pick up a gun again,”_ he’d whispered to Edea, as the Agency’s rented Range Rover fanned its headlights over their forest clearing. _“And I did. And . . . a man is dead.”_

She’d only sighed. There wasn’t much to say.

The mood hadn’t exactly lightened in the car trip back to the safe house, but Victoria’s prickling anger as she wove them through the winter night had managed to pop it, if only for the duration of the trip. When she’d pronounced the two of them _“n00bs”_ for needing a rescue detail at all – pronounced in such a way Alternis _knew_ she spelt it with zeroes – Alternis had almost managed to smile.

Almost.

He was relieved to find Edea sporting a scowl to match his as he knocked on her door. “Come in,” she called, voice straining at the consonants. It was easy to see why. Edea was hanging upside-down off her narrow cot, and thin scraps of paper stretched across her face like doodles in white pen.

“I’ve just been wrapping the snow from the windowsill in toilet paper,” she explained, before sitting up again. “What do you think? Is it helping?”

Under the soggy paper, angry red marks lined Edea’s high cheekbones, and the beginnings of the purple bruises strung her faint freckles together like the world’s worst game of connect-the-dots. At her brow, the bruises were already panda-dark, and a stark contrast to the white bandage peeking out from under her hairline.

“You look great,” lied Alternis. It made her smile, briefly, before she winced it away. “Now,” Alternis went on, “the Marshal was popping these after he got that nose job—”

“—The Marshal got a _nose job_?”

“Well, he _had_ broken it,” Alternis rushed to explain, before pressing a sleeve of Arnica tablets into Edea’s waiting hand. “His nose, that was. Anyhow, I, er, also stole this from Janne’s room.”

“What is that, toothpaste?” Edea turned the tube of cream over in her hands with a slight sneer. Alternis didn’t doubt she’d have pulled a deeper one if she could have, and once again, he figured it wouldn’t be a fight worth picking. Instead, he shrugged.

“Whatever it is, it’s apparently illegal everywhere outside of Orsterra,” he explained, gesturing to the warning labels lining the tube. “Still, it works.”

Wordlessly, Edea squeezed a length of putrid purple paste onto her fingers – but it slid quickly off, even as she scraped the last of her snowy toilet paper off on the leg of her pyjama pants. In contact with the meltwater on her hands, the cream began to separate, a clear, fatty cream snaking across her fingertips as the grittier purple base crumbled onto the floor. Alternis could hardly help but laugh – to which Edea flicked the stuff with all her might toward him, letting it splatter his shirt.

“Here,” Alternis finally relented, “let me.” Edea rolled her eyes, but she sat back on her hands as Alternis patted her face dry with a hand towel, and her only protest was to tense her shoulders as he moved for the paste. His hands still hadn’t stopped shaking from earlier, and so Alternis kept his touch feather-light against Edea’s skin, letting his fingers skip along the blurry lines of her wounds.

Everything was blurry, really, and Alternis blinked hard to clear the slick of tired tears dancing at his eyes.

“There,” he announced instead, flashing a deferential smile. “You’re good to go.”

“Do I still look great?” asked Edea. She couldn’t quite bat her eyes with the paste smeared all around them, but she lowered her eyelids as she offered a coy grin of her own. Alternis was quiet for a moment, before reaching out once more – smearing the last of the paste on his fingers across the bridge of her nose, like some strange purple clown.

“You do now,” he assured her. “Really. You’re gorgeous, _Medusa_.”

Edea’s first response was to swat him across the shoulder, her laughter dry as it crackled through the stiff air of the safe house. Then she sighed, letting her posture fall as she searched for a joke. When one didn’t come, she nodded to Alternis, and he watched a ghost of her brusque demeanour flit across her features, straightening her spine and squaring her shoulders. “The debrief awaits,” she said at last. “You ready?”

“Not even a little.”

Alternis found the entirety of the Agency’s Eternia team in their main parlour, thought that didn’t say much. Victor and Victoria had set up shop on the armchairs by the empty fireplace, their laptops surrounding them like shields as they squabbled over the stolen cell phones. Their wardrobe master, Kikyo, sat cross-legged in the corner by the lamp, hemming yard after yard of their standard black Kevlar, and their on-site cryptologist, Holly Whyte, played with Kikyo’s pincushion as she waited for Cyber to throw her a bone. Janne was draped across the sofa like he was some Renaissance rent boy, legs dangling off the edge and long hair fanning out on the floor where he hung his head. When Alternis pressed into the parlour, he swung up, patting a cushion beside him on the sofa – but Alternis only inclined his head to his friend as he moved to curl up on the floor by Edea’s side. A silent understanding passed between them as she pressed her shoulder to his: a sense that what had happened on that forest road would stay on that forest road, and that they’d both stay silent long enough for the nighttime snows to cover it all up. They could dig it all up if they had to . . .

 _. . . Which might be sooner rather than later,_ thought Alternis, watching the Marshal sweep into the room. He was a tall man who Alternis had always secretly felt took up about thrice as much space as any secret agent ought to have. In a flurry of silk pyjama pants and long, straw-blond hair, the Marshal seemed to move with his own personal spotlight on him – something far better suited to old spy movies than their actual lives.

Nevertheless, the agents in the room all came to a sleep-deprived attention when the Marshal held up one massive hand: even Edea straightened, and in the stuffy chill of the room, Alternis could feel a shock of heat every time her arm or leg brushed his. The Marshal’s gaze swept over the room with a laserlike intensity as he began to speak.

“We have a mole.”

No _“good evening,”_ no _“sorry to disturb you all.”_ Alternis supposed that was for the best. Nobody wanted to be up any longer than they had to – and more to the point, between the hack before the gala and their stakeout being leaked, Alternis could practically feel the seconds shaving off poor, captive Tiz’s life.

 _Tiz. The shootout. The driver._ The instant his mind even toed the threshold to the thought, Alternis felt it flood with a scramble of memories, and watched in dismay as the blue winter night mingled with those dusty desert browns. He shook his head hard to clear it, and saw, rather than felt, as Edea laid a hand he supposed was comforting on his scabby knee.

 _You’ve got this,_ she seemed to say. Alternis didn’t try for an answer – not even a silent one.

The Marshal was speaking again, and Alternis struggled to look interested. “From now on,” he was saying, “all communications to _any_ agents or assets other than your partner go through me. The same applies when we return home. No protests, Whyte!” he burst out, as Holly’s pale hand shot into the air. Alternis knew what she was going to ask. She had a sweetheart on the Agency’s White House correspondent team – some musclehead by the name of Barras Lehr. But the President wasn’t Covert Operations’ discipline. Alternis watched Holly sink sullenly back into her corner, stabbing and stabbing at that pincushion as the Marshal went on.

“CoveOps is the heart of our clandestine services,” the Marshal pressed on, folding his hands behind his back. “A breach to our line of contact is a threat to not only the mission, but to the Agency itself. For this reason—”

“Hold up.” Victor spoke now, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “Don’t we already _have_ a breach in our line of communication?”

One by one, every pair of eyes in the room came to rest on Edea. She coloured violently under the scrutiny. “I am _not_ a mole,” she insisted, hotly. Victoria was gearing up to come to her partner’s defence, but Alternis was quicker.

“Come on, you guys,” he snapped. “Edea is the reason the Pope wasn’t shot during that sting to kidnap Tiz – and she saved my ass today. You weren’t with us, but she—”

“—She compromised your stakeout and was the reason you two needed a rescue detail!” crowed Victor, flinging his hands into the air. Alternis felt his jaw clench, but Edea had already popped to her feet, and she stalked Victor down with her fists at her side.

“Fine,” she cried, “fine! Go on, then, crack open one of the phones _I stole_ and go find my number, listed right under ‘MI6 Mole.’ That is,” she went on, “if you can even get past the passwords.”

“We’ve only had twenty minutes,” began Victoria, but Edea was on a roll.

“And it should only take ten to open up a bloody mobile phone! I swear, you two in Cyber . . . ” Alternis could see the gears in her mind churning as she fumbled for one of those trademark quips. “You Cyber spooks,” she finally decided, “are about as good at your jobs as a _croissant_ is at being a _dildo_.”

Victor would not be deterred. “We’re . . . eccentric and continental?”

“Crystals, you pile of elbows, no! No, not only are you _terrible_ at said jobs, you make a giant mess and prolonged contact with you leaves people with _yeast infections_!”

Edea was breathing hard as she fell into silence again, but she was the only one who was. The rest of the room watched with bated breath as that tension ping-ponged between Victor and Edea . . . until finally the Marshal bellowed out:

“ _Enough_!”

He brought his hand crashing down on the mantlepiece of the fireplace, and Alternis could swear he saw cracks. “Enough, agents,” he said again, voice shaking against the cavernous hollow of his throat. “You’re all acting like children.”

 _As if it’s any wonder!_ Alternis could hardly help but flare at the Marshal’s comment. _You’re the only one here over thirty-freaking-five._ But he held his tongue, even as Janne snaked down from the couch to whisper the same sentiment into his ear.

“I like to think of us as a frat house,” Janne was going on. “Gamma-something-Alpha. Y’know, the CIA.”

“‘Crystalists in Action,’” quipped Alternis. But the words soured on his tongue. In all the hubbub surrounding Edea and Victor, he’d half-forgotten about Pope Oblige . . . and about Tiz Arrior. He turned to the Marshal with a grim frown. “Mole or no mole, we . . . ” Alternis splayed his hands. “Well, I mean, what’s our next move?”

“We follow the helicopter.” Edea seemed even more sullen than Holly was, and Alternis wondered if, with his own scowl colouring his face, they might have passed for a gaggle of Eternians – who were famously blond and bitter. “Tiz Arrior wasn’t supposed to be moved today— oh, don’t give me that look, Victor, I only used my eyes. Anyhow, he was bound up in fresh duct tape, not proper restraints, and the bad guys’ backup helicopter came in the opposite direction of their travel. I’m guessing it left the same way.” It was her turn to spread her hands wide, daring the room to oppose her. “So we can gather that whoever these people are, they’ll be frantic to regroup, at whatever their base of operations is.”

“Hold up.”

Victoria’s voice came as a surprise to Alternis: he felt its sharp consonants pop like grapeshot against his aching mind. “I got the driver’s phone open,” she was saying – and a chorus of groans met her words, as the driver had been ( _had been_ , thought Alternis, stomach churning) a freelancer. “Shut up!” came Victoria’s eloquent reply. “Look at these logs. At twenty-one hundred hours yesterday, he received a call from a United States number. Florem, if I’m guessing right.”

“That’s half an hour we were slated to begin our stakeout,” Alternis piped up. “So whoever this mole was must had access to our itinerary – but only at the last minute. The driver must have been en route at the same time as we were. Otherwise, they would have moved Tiz way in advance.”

“Which proves I’m not the mole,” Edea was quick to interject. “I had the schedule from ten yesterday morning.”

“ _Any_ way,” said Alternis stiffly, “we also know that if the driver’s contact was in Florem, it’s likely our mole had been in contact with someone high up in their ranks. That’s how they’ve been one step ahead of us these past few days – their boss has been sending the soldiers instructions based off of ours. They’ve been working off of the same timetables we have!”

Alternis tried for a smile, but the room was silent as ever. It was rather as though he’d completed his very first jigsaw puzzle – but the puzzle depicted some brutal massacre. Nobody wanted to see those lines connected. Nobody was going to applaud.

Edea gave him a nod of approval, and Alternis supposed it was something.

Finally the Marshal spoke.“Balestra,” he said suddenly. Janne sat up with a start, and Alternis watched him sway from side to side as he struggled to regain his balance on the edge of the sofa. “I’m appointing you to be the handler for Agents Dim and Lee.”

Janne pumped his fist into the air. “I’m on top now, Alternis,” he teased. Alternis rolled his eyes.

“I’ve never been _less_ turned on by that sentence,” he shot back. The Marshal silenced them both with a wave of his hand.

“E— er, Lee,” he said, then, turning on Edea, “I’d like someone from MI6 TechOps to meet your team in Florem. They’ll partner with Balestra as ground control. Can you get a Cyber officer on a redeye?”

Edea was already wearing her thumbs out against the keyboard of her phone. “I’m on the line with one of our best as we speak,” she said. But Alternis knew she couldn’t resist a jibe – and indeed, there it came: “See, you sentient computer viruses? Even your Marshal knows you’re shit.”

“Stuff a sock in it, Fuckingham Palace!” Victoria. Alternis wondered if she’d had that one prepared: it sounded like it.

Nevertheless, Edea caught Alternis’ eye with the first real smile he’d seen in a while, and Janne’s hand was warm on his shoulder as he made to rise. “Alright, then, team,” said Alternis. “Let’s go to Florem.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hnngg i've been trying to write but i'm too dummy thicc and the clap of my thousand actual deadlines is alerting my blank Word documents


	4. From Eternia, with Love

There was something soothingly transient about airports, Alternis found: it calmed him, if nobody else, to know that the linoleum supported the stories of countless busybodies too self-absorbed to care about him, and to know nobody would ever walk down the cold hallways the same way he did. It was easy to be a secret agent when at any given moment, the world could change, and one could be swept up and away. Alternis knew his flight wasn’t for another forty minutes, but he also knew it would hardly take ten to acquire some fake boarding passes and disappear into the daybreak, never to be seen or heard from again.

“ _Neste_! Next up!”

Granted, he did still have an order to place.

It was somehow less calming to know that Gathelatio’s largest airport featured pubs open around the clock. The Eternians Alternis had met during his stay had been a cold, bitter people, and he doubted that cold, bitter ale would serve to cancel that out. As it was, the stout man keeping bar grunted somewhat as Alternis ordered the cheapest bottle of beer he could and a three-sterling cheese sandwich, and did not grunt again. Usually, Alternis enjoyed quiet, but this – an odd, tense pocket of air, a gap in the outlines of the airport hubbub – only made him wish he’d ordered somethingstronger . . . and actually for himself.

Edea wore a red shell jacket over her Lululemons, but Alternis doubted a snowboard was all that was in that long, flat (lead-lined) bag on her back. It was odd to finally be in civilian clothes, though Alternis relished the opportunity to dress down. He’d dug up a T-shirt from his favourite grunge band, and he'd found a pair of silver earrings he’d thought long lost when leaving the safe house. He’d been thrilled to find the piercing holes hadn't closed up, even though jewellery wasn't permitted in the field.

“Nice getup,” teased Edea, as she brushed passed him – literally. The brush pass was an old intelligencer move, and the two of them were old hats at it, even when clandestine notes were swapped for a kale juice in her hand and that lager in his.

“Says the pilates teacher,” Alternis retorted. Still, he smiled as he brought his contraband smoothie to his lips. Dressed as he was, he’d have stuck out like a mourner at a wedding (or just a goth at a juice bar) if he’d tried to order anything from the perky crew down at the airport’s in-house _Smoothie Criminal_ – and likewise, Edea’s name-brand Spandex rather clashed with the dust and the fake brick of that pub. Even using their real passports and knowing full well nobody was after them (not at five in the morning, at any rate) neither Alternis nor Edea were ready to blow their legends open by defying their tired surroundings’ expectations of those civilian clothes.

 _Besides,_ thought Alternis, feeling a telltale crackle behind his ear, _we have instructions to follow._

 _“Miss Teen Highlander, Jack Frosted-Tips, I need you two apart, like, yesterday.”_ Janne’s voice was crisp with a double-espresso kind of clarity as it rang out over the line. Alternis couldn’t help but wince, and he saw Edea pull a matching grimace as she pressed her hand to her earpiece. From his safe perch in the men’s bathrooms, though, Janne wouldn’t have seen it. He’d taken with gusto to his role as their handler; Alternis could just imagine his friend’s smug superiority as he spoke again: _“¡_ Ándale _! Come_ on _, you two, no associations, remember?”_

He had a point. Even field partners weren’t supposed to be seen together in public unless their legends warranted it, and even to be on the same flight was a move that would have sent the Marshal’s superiors’ stomachs churning. As it was now, Alternis had pulled the short straw of sitting in the aisle, behind a block of seats that Cyber’s intelligence told them a Floremian cheerleading team would be taking back home from some competition, and Janne had a window seat right next to the bathrooms.

Edea would be flying first class. Apparently, MI6 did not settle for anything less: her handler, that Agent Heinkel, had made that much explicitly clear as he booked her tickets over the phone.

Still, with two weeks until Crystmas, the airport bustled like a beehive on a collective dose of benzedrine, as harried office workers rushed to get home for the holidays and families tumbled in and out of gift shops. In a way, Alternis wished he were any one of them; that impulse to make a mad dash for the mundanity of a normal life was peppered, now, with the wish to belong to a group that cared enough to visit home on holidays – or at the very least, got holidays off. But in the absence of that, Alternis knew to take advantage of that buzzing crowd. He picked off his earpiece with a smile, and turned that grin on Edea as she did the same. “That sitting area over there has free Internet,” he offered. She rolled her eyes.

“Ah, yes, to check those social media accounts the agencies _definitely_ allow us to have.”

“Come _on_ , ‘Miss Teen Highlander.’”

The sitting area was no less littered with tired travellers than the main floor of the terminal was, and Alternis and Edea had to squeeze into seats pressed up between the wall and a sleeping man with drool on his designer lapels. It was on instinct that Alternis pulled his feet up on the chair, pressing his knees to his chest, and Edea into against her new legroom with a tired nod.

“ _Tusen takk_ ,” she said. Even after a week in the country and with context clues on his side, Alternis still paused as he fumbled through the translation. He’d always been slow with the Nordic languages.

“You speak Eternian?” he chanced instead, by means of _“you’re welcome.”_ Edea shrugged.

“I was born here” came her noncommittal reply, and she took a swill of her beer. Alternis wasn’t sure if that warranted an _“oh, cool”_ or not, and he offered instead,

“Y’know, so was the Marshal.”

“Mm,” said Edea, too quickly, “and so was Olov Gustavsen.”

“Who?”

“ _Exactly_.”

Her minced words had made it abundantly clear _that_ conversation was over, but Alternis knew Edea did little by halves. He watched with a tired concern as she threw back another shot of her beer, and felt his brow furrow as he fumbled for the question. “You shouldn’t be drinking first thing in the morning,” he hazarded. Edea arched an impudent eyebrow, but Alternis pressed on: “Seriously, take care of yourself, okay?”

“I _do_ ,” grumbled Edea. “But last night was . . . well. You were there.” Alternis felt his kale juice, already bitter, sour on his tongue. It was true. He had been there: he’d been all too _“there,”_ and in the hours that had passed since they’d scrambled from that forest road, Alternis had exhausted every last vestige of dissociative distraction he could think of as he distanced himself from the memories. He saw Edea’s eyes narrow, and he moved quickly to school her features, urging her to continue. “Besides,” Edea finally offered, “I need to calm my nerves. I hate flying.”

“Really?” Alternis supposed it wasn’t too surprising – she’d not taken well to the motorcycle. But the thought was still oddly humanising. He offered Edea a wry sort of grin, and watched her freckles meld together under her flush, shoulders shooting up to her ears.

“ _Really_ ,” she shot back. “Laugh it up, why—”

Alternis spread his hands. “I’m not laughing! I mean, everyone’s scared of something, right?” Edea’s voice hitched in her throat with a flustered, _“I’m not scared!”_ but Alternis was still. “Tell you what,” he offered his partner, “as soon as that seatbelt sign turns off, I’ll come up to first class and wait with you, okay?” _Mooch off the free food, while I’m at it._ He watched Edea’s eyes go wide, and her lips parted slightly with what he could only hope was a grateful kind of surprise. Then she swatted him in the arm.

“I don’t need a babysitter, Dim.”

“Sure you don’t.” The smirk stretching across his face was the widest one Alternis could have offered, that early in the morning, and he watched its mirror play at Edea’s lips as well. Some ghost of understanding seemed to hang between them, at that moment, all halfhearted smiles even as Edea made to leave. At that, Alternis reached his hand out to hers, holding her still before she disappeared into the crowd once more.

“I’m serious,” he said. “I’ll see you in first class.”

Another punch in the arm. “You’d best not be late,” replied Edea. And with that, she was gone.

Alternis was true – something many Agency workers could not say – to his word. The very instant that the seatbelt sign went off and the tray tables started coming down, Alternis began picking his way past the gaggle of hairsprayed cheerleaders with a chorus of _“Excuse me, excuse me”_ s. Slipping past the flight attendants barring that curtained doorway was, in the end, no harder than that time he’d broken into the Louvre museum in Sagitta, and Alternis found himself padding down the blue-carpeted cabin floor in no time.

He found Edea in an aisle seat roughly the size of the aisle itself. Really, to call it a seat was something of a stretch: it was a wraparound leather monstrosity whose tray table might actually sport a tea setting, and that came with three blankets – all real cotton, none of that economy-class polyester. Though Edea’s cheeks were tinged with green, the grin she flashed when Alternis reached her side was that of a cat who’d moved right from canaries to children.

“It’s class, isn’t it?” she said, her tone dripping with a saccharine smugness. She reached behind her head and pulled out a cushion with a flourish. “Leather pillows. Who even thought of that?”

Alternis rolled his eyes. “Someone who really hates cows, I’m sure,” he deadpanned. “And, you know, starving refugees. And—”

“Alright, Liberty Belle, I get the gist.” It was Edea’s turn to roll her eyes, but she still patted the space next to her – a great block of plastic that was either an armrest or a stockade – and beckoned Alternis forward. “Come on,” she urged him, “entertain me. We’ve got . . . ” She snuck a glance at the display on the screen on the seat in front of her, and Alternis was relieved, in a way, to see that televisions were no bigger for the rich. “We’ve got seven hours left in this flight,” she finally counted out. Alternis’ smile was soft as he settled in on her armrest, but he was sure to turn it mocking as he watched Edea’s attention fall back on him.

“Gre-ea-eat,” he drawled, “just enough time to tell you all my favourite words starting with ‘Q.’ Um, let’s see. Quotidian, quixotic, queen, Quaalude . . . ”

“This man bothering you, ma’am?”

Alternis might have been glad for the interjection – he was running out of words that started with _“Q”_ – but that brief relief soured like his breakfast had as he whipped around to see a man looming over him, bearing down on Edea’s aisle seat with his eyes narrowed to slits in his great bald head. Edea’s eyes were wide as Alternis met her gaze, and he saw the way her face spasmed between silent laughter and a closemouthed kind of fear as she fumbled for an answer.

“Not at all, sir.” When she did find her voice, it was bright with her fake Luxendarcian accent, and Alternis watched his partner’s cool confidence melt into that valley-girl pep she faked so well. “He was just, er, returning a charger I’d lent him back at the gate.”

“Charger,” Alternis supplied helpfully, fishing around in his pocket for his own. He made a show of folding it into her hand, but the man did not stir, not even as Alternis pushed to his feet once more.

“Thanks for, um, looking out for me?” Even Edea’s smile was beginning to crack, and Alternis watched the man – some two metres tall and steroid-puffy – swell against the confines of his pressed white shirt.

“Just doing my due diligence, little lady.” Gone was _“ma’am,”_ apparently. The flicker of annoyance in Alternis’ chest leapt at the words – but it didn’t stop him from catching Edea’s eye as he angled behind the stranger, moving his clenched fist up and down in a universally rude gesture.

“Wanky,” he mouthed. Edea’s lips were thin as she twisted them into a polite smile, not letting it waver as she moved to brush a lock of hair from her face – using her middle finger. Alternis had to wonder, briefly, if it would have been worth it to put the man out of his imminent misery. Edea’s eyes were flashing with the kind of irritation that led her, Alternis knew by now, to shoot things; she looked about ready to punch the man out of the sky itself. But when the stranger sidled up to the armrest Alternis had been perched on not minutes earlier, he knew he was only complicating a sticky situation. He flashed Edea an apologetic smile as he made to leave, and tapped out a brief text message to her as he pushed back to his seat. _“Good luck,”_ he wrote. _“Hope he shoves off soon.”_

She was more succinct. _“Shoot me.”_

The plane hit Luxendarcian tarmac twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and as he trundled off the plane in a sea of other economy class passengers, Alternis could see a flash of sandy hair and bright red jacket darting down the jetway at breakneck speeds. Edea, no doubt, hurtling toward the pay-to-lock bathrooms dotting the arrival gates of the Florem airport. When they reunited at the car park, he saw she’d swapped her green-tinged nausea for a caffeinated chirpiness – and her athletic getup for an elegant pea coat and high-heeled boots, the zipper of her snowboard bag peeking out from an overstuffed handbag on her elbow. The quick change was another one of those agents’ precautions they all wore carved into their bones: even when an agent wasn’t undercover, it wouldn’t do to have passersby see the same person enter and exit a room.

Alternis, with slacks pulled over his skinny jeans and a festive Crystmas sweater shrugged over his T-shirt, sometimes wondered how wise the rule really was.

As it was, though, he simply raised his hand in a salute to Edea, who crossed the tarmac between them in purposeful steps, her heels _“click-clacking”_ against the ground. Even the sound’s intent was businesslike – made even more so by the stranger running at her side, a wiry young man wearing last season’s basketball sneakers and an ill-fitting marshmallow jacket. He wore the street clothes as uneasily as Alternis supposed he might have his old fatigues, or a straitjacket, and had to ask:  
“Edea, who’s the bowl-cut?”

Edea flashed a wicked grin, thumping her companion on the back. “Alternis, meet Yew Geneolgia, techie extraordinaire. Yew, this is my partner at the CIA, Alternis Dim.” Yew stumbled forward to pump Alternis’ hand, and Alternis tried for a reassuring smile – feeling rather like a shark trying to befriend a goldfish. Yew’s pale skin had flushed a violent red in the midwinter chill, and the blush only deepened as he whipped off his beanie to muss his curly hair back into a style Alternis bet he’d Googled.

“I apologise for my appearance, Agent Dim,” said Yew, all in a rush. Between his top-o’-the-morning Tenebrae accent, his auburn hair, and the way his blue eyes were wide with a rabbity kind of fervour, Yew rather reminded Alternis of the _Lucky Charms_ mascot.

He didn’t say that. What he did say was, “Not at all, Agent Geneolgia,” and he bit his lip to keep from saying anything he really felt. Edea had buried her face in the collar of her coat, and when she finally caught his eye, Alternis could tell she was trying not to laugh at Yew’s prepped-up formality, either. Her voice was strained when she spoke. “Where’s the Lobo?” she wanted to know, using Janne’s codename. Alternis shrugged.

“Getting Starbucks.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant! Yew, love, could you get us some coffees, too?” Edea didn’t wait for him to answer before rattling off, “I’ll have a triple caramel macchiato, half sweet. No, full sweet. And nonfat. Alternis?”

“Um, just black coffee, thanks.” Alternis found he could hardly pull his eyes from Yew’s bright blue nylon as he bounded eagerly back into the terminal. “Edea,” he finally had to ask, “I thought that was MI6’s very best young hacker. Now he’s taking our coffee orders?”

“Mm.” Edea looked duly pleased with herself. “He also sits, rolls over, and goes ‘fetch.’”

Janne and Yew were chattering animatedly as they emerged from the airport once more, and Alternis was hardly surprised to see his friend call shotgun as they all piled into the rental car. He knew Janne moved fast: he often said that much like a lizard (just not a Chameleon) he needed something warm beneath him at all times, to digest his food. Still, when they pulled over for gas, Janne whipped around so fast that Alternis felt he was risking whiplash, cold air whirling past the back seat.

“Edea,” said Janne, wasting no time, “I’ll pay you twenty dollars for you to tell me the Faberge Egghead is single.” His face didn’t really do pleading – all wide, hard angles and heavy brows – but he tried, and his tone was simpering. “Please? _¿Por favor? S’il te_ —”

“ _Crystals_ , my _good man_! I’m _not_ a pimp,” insisted Edea hotly – but her face betrayed her words. She waggled her eyebrows as she brought her coffee to her lips, relenting, “Go for it.”

Then, “Seriously, he needs a shag.”

Alternis was beginning to feel a headache needling at his temples. Suddenly, Edea seemed all aggressive blonde popularity in the back seat next to him; some cookie-cutter Queen Bee, with that confessional smile and sugary Starbucks. Beside her, and behind Janne in his best _“wherefore art thou,”_ Alternis was beginning to feel like a middle schooler again, at odds with his own skin.

Also, his own coffee was terrible. He might have thrown up in his mouth and not noticed the difference; he wasted little time in pouring it into an off-colour snowbank as soon as they pulled off the freeway.

“I saw that.”

Edea quirked an eyebrow, but otherwise, she was statue-still, legs crossed neatly at the ankle. “That coffee came out of the MI6 budget,” she teased, but Alternis didn’t want to bite. Instead, he rolled his window back up and pressed his head against it, letting a something brooding shoot through his practised pigheadedness.

“You know, Lee,” he finally said, “between the day-drinking and that liquid diabetes—” he gestured to her coffee cup with a distaste he hoped was evident “—you really are going to kill yourself.”

“Pish-posh. I’m never going to die.” Coming from her, it sounded like a promise, and Alternis fumbled for an answer:

“Fine, then you’ll kill _me_.”

Edea’s narrow eyes and tight smile made her face a patchwork of warring emotions, but she was all wintry sunshine as she turned to Janne. “I think I know _someone else_ who’s in desperate need of some action,” she said knowingly. Janne cut in before Alternis could even roll his eyes.

“She’s right, Donnie Dork-o,” he chided Alternis. When Alternis pressed his forehead against the window, he imagined the vibrations of the car travelling all the way to his brain, shaking it into solidity. “You need to lighten up.”

Alternis knew the dead-eyed man he saw in his reflection could not predict the future – but he was certain _that_ was never going to happen.

Yew Geneolgia had four laptops, and between them and his labyrinth of cables, the entire king-sized bed in the MI6 agents’ room of their Fifth Avenue hotel was covered in tech Alternis could never hope to understand – or dare to touch. When he’d stepped from the bathroom, his towel over his head, Yew had all but shrieked. _“Stay back!”_ had been his exact words, as he brandished the room’s complimentary hair dryer like Edea did her pistols. _“The computers need to stay_ completely _dry!”_

If he’d tried – or perhaps just let Janne rub off on him a bit more – Alternis was sure he might have found a way to make a joke out of the comment. As it was, though, Alternis accepted his exile on the sofa, and flashed Janne a silent _“be careful”_ as his friend sauntered into the room from their own. Janne didn’t seem to heed the warning. With his skin scrubbed red-raw after a thirty-plus minute shower (Alternis had begun timing it, before drowning in the shame of having to ask Edea if he could use hers) and his towel _precariously_ low on his hips, Janne swaggered to Yew’s side like one of the characters in the _telenovelas_ he made the CoveOps agents watch every Thursday night.

“Okay, _Bae_ -dalus,” said Janne, playing on the codename that Yew had told them in the car, “impress me.”

Yew looked ready to do anything but, his face eggshell-pale in the light of his computer screens. “Agent Balestra, it’s not ‘Bae-dalus,’ it’s Daedalus. Also, it’s not Daedalus, it’s Agent Yew Geneolgia.” His expression was haplessly annoyed as he turned back toward his audience. “There’s no point in codenames if we don’t treat them with respect.”

Janne, Alternis knew, hadn’t treated anything with respect since he still lived with his mother – and even then, it was to avoid getting grounded. Still, he fell silent, and Yew pressed on, mollified.

“It was hard,” he began, “but I did manage to get into the mobiles that Agent Lee stole from your assailants.” He pulled one laptop from the maze, and showed it off to the room. “I planted RATs—” _Fitting,_ thought Alternis, _now that we’re in Florem_ “—on each of the phones, and they’re all mirrored here. See, you can access all the files, and all the contacts . . . not that admin access gets you much. These guys aren’t messing about: they’ve not got any contacts saved, and all their calls to one another are from blocked numbers. They must have been prepared for these phones to get compromised . . . just not by me. Er, sorry, that sounded cocky.”

“It did a bit, actually,” called Edea, poking her head out from the bathroom door. She, too, seemed to have taken the hotel’s abundance of towels as an advertisement for living shirtless, and Alternis found he was suddenly very interested in his socks. “But do go on, Yew. I think—” and here she winked “—I think Balestra’s still waiting to be dazzled.”

She’d tossed Janne a bone with that one, but Alternis was surprised to find that Edea had trained unblinking blue eyes on him, and the muscles in her arms were taut as she folded them over her (towel-clad) ( _only_ towel-clad) chest. Her gaze was expectant, and Alternis flushed under her scrutiny. There was a part of him that wanted to believe some line had been crossed in the car ride – but how? Which one? The best laser security systems, everyone knew, were invisible: you didn’t know if you’d gone too far until the alarms went off.

Still, she was his partner, and Alternis would have to have been as stupid as Janne joked he was not to notice how Edea commanded the attention of whatever room she was in: how she conducted crescendos of tension like they made up the world’s most unnecessary orchestra. Alternis thought it felt wrong to make that shift in their dynamic a spectator sport – but still, he shot Edea a crooked smirk, and said, “No pressure, Yew. Janne’s very easily . . . ‘ _dazzled_.’”

“I hate you.” Janne spoke softly, then, and Alternis patted him on the shoulder.

“Needs must,” he told his friend. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant, but it sounded good.

Edea greeted him with a covergirl smile as she settled in on the arm of the sofa, and she slung a possessive arm around the cushions behind him. Alternis was grateful to note she’d pulled her blouse back on, the cotton rough against his shoulder; her presence – his partner’s solid, steadfast presence – lifted his voice just a little higher when he asked Yew to continue.

Yew did so with what Alternis was beginning to think of as a characteristic lack of gusto. He’d swapped those ridiculous street clothes for a cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses, and Alternis was reminded, distinctly, of a beetle: Yew was all bugged-out eyes, jittery and out of focus in the light of his countless monitors. “Well,” he was saying – _Crystals,_ thought Alternis, even his voice came as a buggy whine, now that he thought about it – “here’s where it gets interesting.”

_Does it, now?_

“You’re making faces.” Edea leaned in close to whisper in his ear, and Alternis tried to school his features as she went on: “At least my Cyber guy isn’t as bad as—”

“Hey! Keep it down back there!” Janne had been lounging on the carpeted floor, but he shot up to swat Alternis in the arm – between Janne and Edea, Alternis supposed, he was going to start to develop a serious bruise. “Yew’s _talking_ ,” he crowed. It was Edea’s turn to pull a face at that, but Alternis fell silent, signalling once more for Yew to carry on.

“Thanks, Agent Balestra.” Yew’s sharpened focus came as a whole-body movement, as he stood, squared his shoulders, and began to pace. “Now, like I was saying, they were careful to wipe their location histories, and the trackers have all been turned off. But most phones do still cache that kind of stuff: it’s tied to the use of mobile data. I wrote some backdoor code while you were all, er, freshening up—” he said this like he didn’t think any of them could smell his name-brand shampoo “—to see if I couldn’t start mapping out where these phones see the most activity. For the past few days, they’ve obviously been amassing some _serious_ roaming charges in Eternia . . . but back in Florem, we can identify one address where data is cached, regularly, at distinct intervals. Like this person was doing shifts on a stakeout.” He tapped at his largest computer a few times, and lifted it up high to show them a grainy map. “Sixteen Gramercy Park South,” he read off the screen. Then he paused. “That sounds familiar.”

Alternis was born and raised in Florem – on East 164th and Washington, to be precise. The crumbling tenement buildings and gum-splattered asphalts of his childhood were a far cry from the gated Gramercy Park, whose wrought-iron fences closed around some of the most expensive real estate in the world. “The Players’ club has its, well, club there,” he said. “And those guys are all Florem royalty.”

“Wait.” Edea sprung catlike from the sofa to one of Yew’s laptops, fingers flying across the keys (to a chorus of his protests). “I knew it!” she cried, after a beat. “Th _e Florem Times_ , not two weeks ago. ‘Florem Players’ Club to Host Papal Charity Ball.’”

 _Papal._ Of the Pope. Alternis felt his eyes grow wide, and Edea prattled on: “‘First Female Pope Breaks Tradition,’” she read, off another article, “‘to Host Crystmas Gala and Mass in Florem.’ There’s scads online. Don’t you remember her speech at the Yulyana Gala?” Here, Edea turned on Alternis, and she pursed her lips when he shook his head: he’d rather had other things on his mind. “The whole reason she won the prize was her new initiative to help persecuted Crystalists in Ancheim and Harena build new religious infrastructure – I guess she wants the Players’ Club and all their billionaires to, you know, finance all those temples.” At this, she rubbed at her own temples, and deflated against the harsh outlines of her red blouse. “But that brings us back to the Pope.”

“Decidedly _not_ the kidnappers’ target,” Alternis added. He slid from the sofa to kneel at the foot of the bed with Edea, and fiddled with the laptop between them until he found it: the traffic footage the Florem Police Department recorded on each and every street. The manicured curbs of Gramercy Park were lined with Bentleys and Rolls Royces with tinted windows – but parked, as of last night’s time-stamp, outside number _fifteen_ , was a modest electric Prius.

“Somehow,” said Alternis, as he spun the laptop around to show the others, “Agnès and Tiz are connected to this same plot. And what better way to find out how . . . than to ask her?”

A thin layer of snow crunched under Alternis’ best and only dress shoes as he padded across the street, his footsteps soft and uncontoured next to the stiletto points of Edea’s. She matched his languid pace with rapid steps, and Alternis watched her breath cloud at her lips as she followed doggedly at his side.

“Crystals, but you walk fast,” she complained. Alternis grinned into his coat collar, careful not to let the vapour of his own breath crystallise against the heavy wool. All long legs and pent-up energy, he had always known he’d crammed too much movement into a too-still body.

But he didn’t suppose Edea would be too happy with him if he broke into a sprint.

Instead he turned slowly on his heel to face her, walking idly backwards down the empty street. This close to Gramercy’s gates, anyone who was anyone would be locked up inside, or at least still at work. Not even tourists came this close to the famous brick houses – which was why Alternis called out to Edea as they walked, feeling a furrow carve into his brow.

“Keep your head down,” he found himself calling to her. Edea had spent the whole walk across the borough with her head craned back, even as the neon and skyscrapers of the city central faded into more traditional stooped architecture. “Only tourists gawk at everything like that.”

“How do you know I’m not, uh, looking for . . . for snipers?”

“Because Yew is on eyeball, and because Janne is two blocks behind us.” _We’d notice if_ he _got shot._ Somewhere along Irving Place, Janne was singing Crystmas carols softly into his earpiece, and Alternis could feel his friend’s crackling tenor needle into his ear.

Edea relented with a wry smile. In the chill, her high cheekbones were blasted as red as her pea coat, but her eyes danced in the afternoon light bouncing off the snow. She looked remarkably in her element for someone so clearly out of town – which was perhaps, Alternis figured, why he didn’t really prickle as she bumped his hip with hers. “You’re awful _blue_ today, Chameleon,” she teased. Then she paused. “Get it? ‘Blue?’ Because chameleons change colour?”

It had been a stretch even a secret agent, with all their athletic training, would have to warm up in order to make. Alternis rolled his eyes. “I got it, Medusa. Really, I’m _petrified_ with laughter here.”

“Hardy har har, you’re _such_ a wit.” Edea’s grin cut at pin corners when she brightened. “A _Dim_ -wit! Oh, how didn’t I think of that one before?”

Janne’s voice cracking against a harmony to _O, Crystmas Tree_ came as a shockingly welcome end to Edea’s rebukes; even as Alternis winced in pain as the static erupted in his ear, he was relieved they’d moved on to something new to laugh about. A comfortable silence fell over their walk in a gentle flurry, settling a little more intently with every tiny snowflake. With the fresh snow a gleaming white (as of yet untainted by dogs’ yellow _additions_ or by the grey slush of Florem’s subways’ mystery fluids) and the bricks of the townhouses that muted, comforting red, Alternis could almost forget about the mission: he and Edea could have been any old people on any old street, and he could let his posture fall to ease as the winter promised to cover up all the ugly parts of his life – snow sweeping over prickling memories and blistering winds freezing deadlines in their tracks.

But the awning to number Fifteen, Gramercy Park, was in sight. And Alternis knew they had work to do.

That notion didn’t stop Edea from halting dead in her tracks as they brushed past the Players’ Club, the heel of one of her boots knocking against the bars of the sub-basement windows with a _“clang!”_ Alternis turned stiffly to face her, watching with narrow eyes as she reached a gloved hand to the brick. The columns were simple, square structures in muted granite, but two intricate etchings were carved deep into one of them: the first, a corona of sunbeams surroundinga one-eyed pyramid, and the second a rose, whose thorns were carved to drip even before the snow melted on them.

“Edea?” Alternis debated placing a hand on her shoulder, before folding his fingers against her palm instead, tugging on her arm. “Come on, we can look at art later . . . ”

For once, Edea said nothing. Her fingers lingered on the petals of the rose, and Alternis could see they were shaking, even beneath the leather of her glove. Her free hand was still locked in his, and Alternis squeezed her palm. “ _Edea_ ,” he said, more firmly this time, “we have to get to work.”

When Edea met his stare, her eyes were glassy, and her gaze seemed warped behind the slick of tears threatening her mascara. But she nodded: once, twice, three times. Alternis moved to tug his hand from hers, but she held it fast.

“For appearances’ sake,” she insisted. He rolled his lips.

“Sure.”

Alternis watched their reflections loom in the bulletproof glass of the grand double doors as they drew closer, the shadow of his arm rippling like oil as he moved to salute the doorman. It was an instinctive behaviour: only Florem’s poorer citizens ever really seemed to see the working class, and it was polite to acknowledge them (even if their employers never did).

But the doorman stiffened at the gesture, and too slowly, Alternis saw the flash of yellow across the breast of their jacket wasn’t piping – but block letters. _Interpol,_ it said. The figure – a young woman with ash-blonde hair and a slight sneer – had a pistol at her side and a baton strapped to her thigh, and it was all Alternis could do not to shove Edea in front of him so he could make a run for it. She was armed, he knew. She could take care of this.

 _Then, there isn’t anything to take care of,_ Alternis reminded herself. _We’re government agents. This is all legal._

_For once._

“State your business,” said the woman by the door. Her words lulled together, her consonants a heady buzz, under a heavy Sagittan accent; briefly, Alternis wished that Janne would be by his side, rather than doing recon two blocks away. Janne’s father, the late Mr. Angard, came from old noble blood in Sagitta – but then, Alternis knew his friend had been raised by his Orsterran mother, and that his capacity for his father’s language began and ended with _“Oui oui croissant.”_ So he flashed dimples up at the woman instead.

“We’re CIA,” he said. There was no use in beating around the bush. “We have to meet with the Pope – she’s an operative.”

“Sure she is.” The woman arched her eyebrows, harsh dark lines against the faint flush to her skin. “And let me guess, Carmen Sandiego here with you is secretly the Queen of Eisenberg?” She gestured to Edea, who stiffened under her bright red coat. “I’m under strict orders to keep the Pope shielded from the outside world until her gala.”

“We _aren’t_ the outside world, though, are we?” Edea certainly seemed to be _channelling_ Queen Eleanor II as she drew herself to her full, high-heeled height. “We’re national law enforcement.”

“The Pope isn’t even a Luxendarcian citizen. Why should she be your prerogative?”

“Oh, _Cristaux_ , woman, why have _you_ got such a baguette up your arse?” Edea splayed her hands, and Alternis found himself hiding laughter behind his palm as she reddened. “You’re Interpol foreign security?” she finally reasoned. “Then you must work under Chief Appleberry.” The woman inclined her head in a nod as Edea plowed on: “And I, personally, know that old Appleberry _wouldn’t_ take kindly to knowing one of his agents obstructed an ongoing operation orchestrated by Argent Heinkel himself.”

Heinkel’s name must have held weight on the continent, Alternis supposed, because the woman’s red-brown eyes went wide, her lashes dropping dark shadows over the lines of her cheeks. “You’re—” she began, and Edea flashed a disarming smile.

“There’s a good girl, Agent . . . _Magnolia Arch_ ,” she cooed, casually sliding a business card from the woman’s pocket.It was a fluid movement: Edea moved with the practiced grace of a pickpocket. “Thanks for all your help.”

Magnolia Arch certainly looked to have a _“baguette up her arse”_ now, and she spluttered as Edea pushed for the doors. Alternis found himself jogging to keep up, though his stride so far outstripped hers. “That was amazing!” Alternis was shocked to hear his voice shoot up an octave as he pushed past Edea on the marble floor of the lobby. “How did you know she’d cave?”

“I . . . didn’t.” The last few vestiges of her familiar fire were flickering away again, and that glassy stare was coming back with an intent. Alternis fixed her with an arch look as she shook her head to clear it. “Come on,” Edea was calling, “let’s get this over with.”

They found Pope Agnès Oblige in an opulent parlour on the second and top floor, sitting primly in the soft green light filtering from the stained-glass skylight above her. The far walls were in a dark, constricting teak, and Alternis was half-certain the rug under their feet was real leopard fur.

The thought made his stomach turn.

“Hello?”

Agnès’ voice lacked its usual timbre as she turned stiffly on her brocaded velvet sofa, and it shot up half an octave when she spoke again, eyes narrowed in disbelieving scrutiny. “You,” she began, pointing at Alternis. “The . . . Amnesty man. And . . . Praline à la Mode?”

Edea rolled her eyes. “Hardly,” she whispered. Alternis flashed an apologetic grimace – who for, he couldn’t be sure. Agnès rose unsteadily to her feet, and as she crossed her arms, Alternis saw the enormous brooch glittering at her chest: an ouroboros, in emeralds and malachite. If he hadn’t seen the same piece at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not two months ago, he might have dismissed it as needlessly gaudy, a poor show of wealth (and even so, he shuddered to think of how many people might have in some way been helped by the time, effort, and money sunk into those green gems).

He didn’t voice the thought. What Alternis did find himself doing was snapping to attention, a stiff-shouldered holdover from his days in the Marine Corps, and announcing, “Your Excellency, we did meet at the Yulyana gala, but you might remember we, er, aren’t who we said we were.”

Edea’s eyes flashed as she moved to stand at his side. _Don’t dawdle,_ said her icy gaze. “We’ve received clearance from Agent Arch outside,” she pointed out, and Agnès deflated against the velvet cushions of her sofa. “I’m Agent Lee, with MI6, and this is my partner Agent Dim, with the CIA. Though we understand Interpol is covering your security detail, the powers we represent have been working for some time in an attempt to foil events like the attack at the gala.” Alternis had never heard Edea say quite so many words without insulting someone – and indeed, she cocked her hip as she moved on to announce, “Which, thanks to some faulty information and a breach of _someone’s_ security, went awry.”

Agnès narrowed her eyes. When she pushed to her feet, Alternis saw she was almost of a height with him, and she gathered the tension of the room around her like a cloak, bearing it down on them with an innate gravitas. “Whatever that was, I’ve washed my hands of it,” she snapped. “For once, this year, I wasn’t the target – and I’ve had enough people waste enough time on the question of my ‘security’ when there’s work to be done.”

Alternis held up his hand at the notion. “We aren’t here to discuss your security,” he told the most infamous woman in religious history – not unkindly. “We’re here because of Tiz Arrior.”

“Tiz?” Agnès blinked – once, twice, three times, and Alternis watched as the hem of her robe slipped off her shoulder. Her skin was red-raw with a nasty, creeping rash. _Poor wretch,_ Alternis found himself thinking, _the stress has given her hives._ Or perhaps it was eczema. Alternis had suffered from the condition until he was thirteen, at which point he’d finally sold enough _Make-a-Wish_ candy bars to afford a dermatologist’s visit.

“What does, ah, Mr. Arrior have to do with me?”asked Agnès. She stumbled over the formality, and Alternis caught Edea’s eye as his partner moved around the perimeter of the room. _She_ does _know him,_ said the glance. Still, Agnès’ voice was high and tight as she went on. “Is he all right?”

“You saw him get kidnapped,” said Edea softly. “We all did.”

“And it hasn’t been covered in any news sources,” Alternis pointed out. “Tiz Arrior has no known connections, no living relatives.” He’d been made famous after the tragic, en-masse death of his family, actually. It was a harrowing thought. “Yet we have reason to believe his kidnappers still have their sights on you.”

Alternis watched a war of emotions play out across the flat planes of Agnès’ face, fear dawning in her dark eyes as her mouth rolled to a paper-thin line. She was silent for a minute, maybe two, and Alternis could feel a needling pain work up his lungs as the air stopped moving through the room: nobody dared to breathe. When Agnès did speak, it was so quiet it slipped neatly under that oppressive fog, working soft-coloured threads through the grand white tapestry of the silence.

“Not here,” she finally said. “Not . . . not if you think people will hear.” She wrung her hands. “I know some things. Not many. Tiz was keeping secrets – and you’ll have to, too.”

“Not a problem, Your Excellency.” Edea quirked an eyebrow, and Alternis shot her a fleeting grin. “We’re Secret Service, remember? It’s all part of the job.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this double-stuf chapter was brought to you by our sponsors: infodumping, character introdcution, and my impending guilt over being away this weekend which means i can't write for the fic i myself am one of four (4) readers of
> 
> jk love you guys


	5. Solitaire

Agnès Oblige had asked to meet for breakfast at a restaurant Alternis supposed she thought was inconspicuous: a hole-in-the-wall Harenan place off of 30th and Broadway, where the haggled and harried suffering the insomnia of their night shifts gathered to nurse their headaches over falafel and shawarma. With a scarf draped over her head and dark circles under her eyes, Agnès looked like she might have fit in – but the tiled floor seemed to Alternis to be the glassy sea surrounding his and Edea’s attention-grabbing islands. If nothing else, they were altogether too _blond_ to visit the place before its lunch-hour rush. Still, when he’d voiced the thought to Edea, she’d only pouted at him.

 _“I love shawarma,”_ her protest had come.

_“Not the point, Lee.”_

They found the Pope at a corner table, tucked away behind a jungle of potted palms and a mop propped up against the intricately patterned wallpaper. She held her newspaper in front of her like a shield, and Alternis had to wonder, briefly, if she’d spent the night watching James Bond movies, or Googling how best to seem a wallflower. _Does the Pope even need Google?_ Perhaps she just prayed to her Crystals and her Virgin Airy for answers to those little questions.

If so, they weren’t much help.

“Over here,” called Her Excellency. Alternis rolled his lips.

“We know,” he replied.

Though it was far from the drop-site he would have chosen, Alternis was grateful to nestle into the corner of their booth seat, his feet resting on the radiator as he hugged his knees to his chest. He and Edea wadded their coats between them like cushions, and for a moment, on that cracked Pleather and with the blare of early-morning Florem buzzing outside the dusty windows, Alternis felt almost at home. He was in his element, at any rate.

Edea shattered his reverie with a delicate cough. “Your _hijab_ is falling off, Your Excellency.” Agnès coloured with a scowl, and it seemed to shave years off her face. Still, she reached to tug the silk closer to her hairline, letting its shadow fall deeper over her brow.

“Blasted thing,” she muttered. “There’s a reason Crystalists don’t put up with this nonsense.”

Alternis decided he was in no place to comment, and his elbow found its way to Edea’s side as she opened her mouth. She snapped it shut with a frown to rival the Pope’s, but she kept it shut: falling into line with a resolution that could only have been born of the fact that neither of them had slept a wink. The ceramic cup a young waiter set in front of him was _“fun-sized”_ even for an espresso, and Alternis found himself swiping at his eyes as Agnès steepled her fingers.

“So,” she began, “I do have a few questions before I tell you what I know. I’ve thought about it, and, well . . . I’m just not sure I can trust you.” Alternis felt Edea nudge him in the shoulder, drawing his attention to her knowing smirk – it wasn’t rare people in their line of work were deemed untrustworthy. Still, Agnès rushed to defend herself. “It’s nothing to do with you personally!” she was quick to assert. “But I _was_ led to know you under false pretences. And, er . . . ” Here she did frown, eyebrows knitting across her forehead. “Well,” she finally reasoned, “aren’t you two a little young to be federal agents?”

“We’re also a little short to be Stormtroopers,” quipped Edea. Agnès only fixed her with a blank stare, and Alternis rolled his lips, searching for the words.

“Many agents working in the field for CoveOps are rather young,” he finally relented. _That way, there’s a guarantee we’re either athletic, attractive, or at least anonymous._ Janne liked to joke that their youth – and thereby, their lack of spousal attachments or pensions – meant that they weren’t just anonymous, but expendable. It was a sobering thought. “I was recruited when I was twenty,” Alternis finally explained, bringing himself back to life, “so I’ve been with the Agency for almost four years, now.”

“And you?” Agnès turned to Edea, who stiffened at the question.

“I . . . I was raised into this life, ma’am.” Her elfin features were drawn with a vulnerability that didn’t suit her. “Er, that is, Your Excellency.”

Agnès was speaking again – likely some tangent she didn’t mean and that they didn’t believe, about how she _“wouldn’t be one for titles”_ – but Alternis found his gaze meeting Edea’s, and he felt his expression soften as she retreated into her scarf. It wasn’t as common for the Agency now as it had been during the Cold War, but the draughty hallways of Central Command still housed what they called the _“honeyguides:”_ agents whose elementary schooling had been conducted behind iron walls and layers of legends. He supposed the practice hadn’t yet let up on the continent, and he felt a pang of sympathy for his partner. His own childhood had been far from idyllic, but at least he had a _“normal:”_ something to cling to under cover and against the threat of torture.

Edea simply schooled her features, settling behind a glazed calm. Even as her shoulders tensed, her voice was cool and dry when she spoke once more. “Are we still beating around the bush?” she wanted to know. “If we are, we might invite Agent Arch inside. I doubt she’s one for the cold.”

Alternis felt himself struggling to keep his expression blank as he turned on the window behind them. Sure enough, Magnolia was standing under the awning of a bodega across the street, and even through the patchwork of yellow taxicabs he could see her breath hanging in clouds before her face. Back inside, Agnès was scowling.

“Is this some kind of interrogation?” she demanded of Edea. Her grip tightened almost imperceptibly around her fork – but Alternis would not let such details go unnoticed again. He lifted the salt shaker and tilted its lid toward him, using its surface as a blurry mirror to watch as across the street, Magnolia shot a pensive glance over either shoulder. Either Interpol didn’t do stealth very well, or the poor woman needed to _“faire du pipi.”_

Either way, Alternis knew they could not dawdle forever. “You know Tiz Arrior,” he said to Agnès. He wasn’t asking. He watched her round cheeks darken under the shadow of her _hijab_ , and her knuckles whiten against that fork.

“A lot of people do. He’s quite famous.”

She was too quick to deflect the question: she was acting on instinct, some deep-rooted fear blooming amongst her words. But Alternis’ face was set, and Edea’s glare stony; Agnès swallowed hard and tried again. “I first met Tiz when he spoke at the Vestment,” she said, speaking of the Crystal Orthodoxy’s continental city-state. “He wanted to speak out against the Orthodoxy’s silence about the Great Chasm. I was new as Pope, then, and I was hesitant to make waves with the Anticrystalist movements . . . but I also made sure we donated millions to the cause, and we began identifying Orthodoxy donors who’d been involved with the companies responsible.”

Alternis nodded: once, twice. Tiz came from a native reservation in the rust-belt state of Norende, and he’d lost his whole family to a landslide known as the Great Chasm when local fracking initiatives overrode the regulations in place for the land. It was his environmental activism that had put him on the map for the Yulyana Prize – and that same activism that had spurred Luxendarc’s president to crack down on those reservations, drawing harsh restrictions against the political involvement their elders were entitled to. Tiz was famous, to be sure, but he was not well-loved by the top one percent.

Agnès was speaking again, her stare blank. “There was one group in particular Tiz was cracking down on these past few years: the Starkfort Petroleum group, that Eisenberg energy company. They were the main investors in the Norende project, as I’m sure you know.” Her gaze flitted to Edea, then, who simply took another sip of her _salep_. Alternis knew his partner had retreated behind a glassiness she didn’t feel, that she was just waiting for her time to strike. She wasn’t patient, not by any means, but she could fake it. “The last time I spoke with Tiz,” Agnès finally finished, “he’d taken his fight directly to Starkfort’s CEO: Qutd ad-Din Qada. He’d decided to use his Yulyana Prize earnings to buy Qada’s shares of the Norende land. Qada took him up on the offer, and three weeks later . . . well, three weeks later, I accepted the Yulyana Peace Prize.”

 _Three weeks later, Tiz was kidnapped._ Alternis watched Agnès’ features twist delicately into a frown he supposed she thought resolute. It was an expression he’d seen in the news a thousand times, and one he’d never quite believed when it came with empty promises about charity work or protection of the Orthodoxy’s altar boys and Vestals. He met the Pope’s frown with a blank stare. “Your Excellency,” he hazarded, “yesterday, you implied that Tiz’s involvement with his apparent kidnappers placed _you_ in danger.” He’d thought to leave the question hanging – to let Agnès rise to the bait herself – but then, Edea slammed her mug down on the table, so hard the salt shaker and catsup bottle jumped (and Alternis did, as well).

“If we were here to hear about Big Oil,” snarled Edea, “we’d have contacted Greenpeace. But Starkfort Petroleum isn’t a religious organisation, _Your Excellency_.” She spat the title out like a hairball: something unwelcome, dripping with venom. “So wise up, and tell us how all this gossip links back to the fact you’re being watched by billionaires waving around the emblems of the Bloodrose Legion and the Dawn of Providence!”

“I—”

“ _Tell us about Fiore DeRosa_!”

Edea was breathing hard, perched precariously on the edge of her seat. It seemed to Alternis her only anchor was the way her fist was clenched around the handle of that chipped old mug, and wordlessly, he reached under the table to offer her another: wrapping his hand around hers. Her skin was slick pressed to his, and he felt her grip grinding his knuckles together – but he stayed silent for as long as it took her to do the same. Across the table, though, Agnès was even further from calm. Her long fingers twitched at the hem of her _hijab_ , pulling its fraying silk back and forth against that angry rash of hers, which seemed to crawl up her neck like (poison) ivy as she flushed.

“You watch your tone,” she warned Edea. Her voice shook within the stiff confines of her whisper, and her breaths came with a hissy echo as she leaned away from the table, drawing their tense hush around her. “I told you what I promised I would.”

 _Not really,_ thought Alternis. He thinned his lips as he looked at the Pope, seeing her, perhaps for the first time, for _who_ she was: a twenty-eight-year-old woman from a country wracked by a civil war he knew the horrors of all too well. When his gaze met her dark eyes, Alternis imagined, for a moment, that she saw the world as he did – as a vipers’ nest of triggers both real and figurative, whose harsh edges were only just covered by the fresh, shiny coat of paint that was the twenty-first century.

But he did not need to imagine to feel Edea’s hand in his, or the way her pulse pounded through her skin. And though Agnès’ hunched posture and silky anger seemed a promise of terribly distressing conversation – if Alternis somehow ever got the chance to talk trauma with Her Excellency – there was a fake ID in his pocket and a can of Mace in Edea’s, cold, metal reminders that this Agency-issued world of theirs waited for nobody’s feelings. Alternis knew there was work to be done, and that the Pope was no less expendable to this operation than anyone. So he straightened.

“Your Excellency,” said Alternis softly, “everyone here is fully aware you know more than you’re letting on. And I’m sure you think you’d be putting yourself in danger, not telling us about all the parties involved – but it’s far from as much danger as your omission puts Tiz in.” Prying himself from the booth’s corner was a laborious process, but Alternis was sure to draw himself up to his full height as he bore down on Agnès. On the Pope. “Do you know what it means, when someone is kidnapped without a ransom?” he asked her. “It means that someone has a score to settle. It means they have something to prove to their hostage. _It means_ that somewhere out there, Tiz Arrior is strapped to a metal folding chair with a burlap sack over his head, and the only way he knows time’s passing is the intervals at which his captors come in to _beat_ him.” Alternis lifted his chin with as much stability as he could muster up. It seemed, at that moment, that the whole restaurant had melted away: that the only forces left in the room were the crackling thunderclaps of intermittent anger, and the tension clouding their table, buzzing like ozone. “It means, Your Excellency,” he finally resolved, “that Tiz’s life is in the hands of those who know why he’s in danger in the first place. So . . . well, you know. You might want to think about tightening your grip.”

The MI6 agents might have had the luxury of a hotel room free from Janne Balestra, and his monopoly on the shower, but Alternis was proud to note that the room the two of them shared was the one with a view. Picture windows spanned the entirety of their far wall, spilling that warped winter sunlight over the king-sized bed Janne had also claimed as his and the leather sofa Alternis supposed he was content to sleep on.

Now, though, that light edged halfheartedly past a scattered array of papers and Blu-tac to spray the room with a Guggenheim checkerboard. Alternis was torn between a want to cover his eyes and to force them open. Beside him, though, Edea was more direct.

“Nice murder board, Yew.”

Yew barely turned from his work at the windows, though Alternis watched his shoulders shoot up to his ears, his hands tensing against the roll of masking tape in his hands. “A knock might have been appreciated,” he grumbled, but the point was more than moot. Secret agents didn’t knock. It sort of defeated the point.

In lieu of any such greetings, though, Alternis took an awkward perch on the edge of Janne’s bed without a word. Edea joined him just as quietly, and Alternis watched as she fumbled to smooth out the wrinkles in the duvet at her side. It was on instinct he moved to help her: she was getting little done on her own.

Finally, Yew turned toward them, and his eyebrows were knit in a dark line across his face. “Well,” he said slowly, “I’ve been—”

Unless the follow-up to that sentence was _“redecorating,”_ Alternis couldn’t have been sure what it was Yew had been doing. Still, he didn’t have long to mull over the thought. The door burst open, and it hit the wall with a resounding crash – but Janne, the imprint of his cell phone a shadow over his irritated flush, didn’t seem too bothered by his explosive entrance (or, rather, he didn’t seem like he could be any more bothered than he already was).

“ _Well_ , if it isn’t Hepatitis A and Hepatitis Lee!” Janne was a whirlwind in ill-fitting pyjamas, his arms and legs tense as coiled steel where they poked out from the hems of those Superman co-ordinates. “Congratulations, geniuses,” he pressed on, “you blew it!”

“It’s _genii_ ,” huffed Yew. Alternis was shocked to hear an icy composure backing that watery voice – but even Yew could not bring Janne down. Indeed, Alternis watched his friend fling his hands skyward, tearing at his dark hair like early-onset alopecia would somehow clear his mind.

“Seriously!” he was going on. “Lee, what were you thinking? We decided this morning we’d try to get the Pope on our side. Could you not _fit_ those instructions in your Barbie Malibu Dream Brain, or did you just decide tanking the questioning would be ‘more of a laugh?’” His voice came out strangled as he forced it into a mocking falsetto, adopting a cockney accent in what Alternis could only suppose was in imitation of Edea. The thought seemed a promise to send his blood boiling; Alternis could hardly help but lash out.

“Don’t say that!” he groused. “Don’t you dare, Janne. She needed information that Agnès wasn’t giving up—”

“Oh, shut it!” Janne cried. Alternis could hear the crackling of fight-damaged joints as Janne brought his hands down to point an accusing finger at him. “If you hadn’t gone all _Batman Begins_ with that little torture soliloquy of yours, you—”

“Ooh, ‘soliloquy.’ Was that your word of the day today, Mr. Red, White, n’ Blues, or did you just get it off of a cereal box?” It was Edea’s turn to cut in, and she did so with a sneer, her clipped words zinging off bland hotel furniture like stones from a slingshot. For all her blustering, though, her anger seemed insubstantial; desperate, somehow, rather than demanding and borderline-despotic. It was as though the crooked Lego tower of their operation had been upended for the umpteenth time, and that by now, the pieces were too dented to stick back together. Alternis longed to come to Edea’s defence, as he watched the fury in her blue eyes flare at the burning stare in Janne’s – but his was not the first voice to enter the fray:

“ _Enough_!”

Yew’s face had flushed a thousand shades of red under his mop of auburn hair, and his skinny chest heaved under his cardigan. “Enough,” he said again. “I can’t sit here and listen to all of you like this! I mean, honest, I’ll not dress it up – you lot are doing an awful lot of pointing the finger for people who’ve forgotten who our real adversaries are.”

Yew stood in the narrow beam of light flooding from between two newspapers stuck to the windows, and the soft contours of his frame were blown into overexposure against those long shadows. Had he been anyone other than a tiny techie from Tenebrae, Yew might have looked, with the sun in a halo behind him and his frown a grim slash, like some half-baked messiah: a messenger of Pope Oblige’s come to chastise them into protecting her. But as it was, Alternis only saw rumpled clothes and jet lag. The image of all of them – Yew and Janne, stretched too thin, Edea, hackles raised under her Hermès scarf – was one that sent off an orchestra of alarms in the agent’s half of his mind. To memories of the Marshal’s training and to the crosshatch of scars across his skin, the idea that their ragtag group was to take on Big Oil and the Orthodoxy was one that seemed slated to fail.

But Alternis wasn’t only an agent. And the part of him that was twenty-four and wearing his favourite leather jacket thought that the only bets worth taking were ones where the odds were stacked high against him; it was a hectoring kind of naïveté that had long since decided that only the impossible made for good stories. Alternis might have convinced himself, once, that he was better than such thundering. All the same, while the agent in him saw only a cat’s cradle of catastrophe tangling the four of them together, that last sliver of boyhood hiding under the sore muscle of his chest figured they might as well have tried.

(It was acutely aware, that part of him, that Edea was pressed against him on Janne’s bed, her pinky hovering next to his. It would not let him forget _that_.)

All Alternis could think to do was sigh, folding his arms against his chest. “Agnès had completely changed her tune from yesterday’s,” he said, looking to Edea and Janne: for assent and resignation, respectively. “Something must have happened between now and then to persuade her not to tell us about _her_ involvement in everything. Could she have been threatened?”

“Or bribed,” Edea was quick to point out. Even Yew, who wore a confirmation necklace bright with gold, had to grimace at the thought. For a faith so staunchly down-to-earth, the borders of the Orthodoxy’s many dioceses seemed encrusted with blood diamonds.

Janne’s scowl had hardly shifted since he’d first stormed into the room, but he wore it now with a professional detachment. “Edea,” he said, sounding her first name out carefully, “you mentioned something called the Dawn of Providence. Care to fill us in?”

Alternis found himself balking at Janne, who sat, nonplussed as anyone could have been, on the edge of Alternis’ sofa. The Dawn of Providence may have been listed under the category of _“secret societies”_ on Wikipedia, but by now, they were anything but. Almost nine hundred years after their founding as an order of Crusaders vowed to protect Crystalists on their pilgrimages, the Dawn had devolved to a constellation of gentleman’s clubs dotting the globe, whose Daybreak Lodges served mostly as casinos for those who believed poker was best played with solid silver chips. Alternis thought back to the pillar outside the Players’ Club, and how Edea had stopped to stare at the all-seeing eye carved there. He supposed it made sense for the Players to host the local Lodge.

But beside him, Edea was hunched over herself, wrapping a strand of sandy hair around the tip of her finger until her skin went as blue as her eyes. “It isn’t the Dawn we need to be worried about,” she said, voice hoarse. “Alternis, do you remember the other symbol we saw at the Club?”

He did, if only vaguely: a thorny rose, dripping with either lazy sculpture or blood. _Not very creative,_ he couldn’t help but think, remembering Edea’s earlier cry about what she’d called the _“Bloodrose Legion.”_ It rather sounded like a band he would have listened to when he was thirteen – but Edea, who’d gone back to fiddling with the blankets without looking at her hands, didn’t look like she wanted to hear it. Instead, Alternis let himself slump down against his jacket, shrugging as casually as he could. “How do they tie to the Dawn?” he wanted to know. When Edea’s only answer was a great huffy breath as she let herself sink into the mattress, it was Yew who spoke up.

“They _are_ the Dawn,” he stated, flatly. He flitted to his sprawling _“murder board,”_ and moved with a serpentine speed as he pulled papers and printouts from the spools of red yarn connecting them. Wordlessly, Alternis took the stack Yew presented him with. He imagined filing the grainy satellite maps and Web forum printouts away for later as he moved on to glossy Polaroids and mugshots. Yew had helpfully circled what Alternis otherwise knew to look for: gold jewellery and tattoos, pixels just barely twisted into the squiggly shapes of roses and thorns, all decorating countless figures whose arrests for tax fraud and insider trading had made headlines worldwide.

“When the Dawn started moving away from actual military ventures, some of their men, the Daybreakers, didn’t take to it well,” Yew was explaining. “Some time during the Luxendarcian revolution, some of the Lodges in Eisenberg banded together to start taking more drastic measures against their brothers overseas: kidnapping emissaries, letter-bombs – you know, like you do. By the nineteenth century, the richest Daybreakers, the last real pirates, and the odd continental noble had banded together to form the Bloodrose Legion.”

“They controlled the underworld,” Edea went on. She’d just barely picked herself up from the mattress, and her voice was muffled by her scarf, tugged high over her chin. “From opium to the slave trade, the Bloodrose Legion made sure they had their hands in all of it. Everyone knew it, too. But they bankrolled their big brothers in the Dawn of Providence – which is to say, they had the Crystal Orthodoxy at their side.”

The silence to fall at her words was palatial, cold and looming. Janne was the first to stir. “The two of you have done your research,” he began, trying for a joke. But Alternis could only press:

“Fiore DeRosa.”

It wasn’t a question, and Edea’s hapless frown wasn’t an answer. Still, she took his hand when Alternis extended it to her, thinning her lips as he helped her back upright. “That name holds about as much weight as my interest in pay-per-view wrestling,” she drolled, voice so flat she might have believed it herself. But when Alternis moved to tug his hand away from her, he watched as the movement sent a hairline fracture up that tough-as-algebra facade. Edea’s voice was soft when she spoke again. “Fine. He’s . . . he _was_ MI6. My, uh, my field partner.” Her hand drifted to her chest, and Alternis watched her gaze pendulum between some sick longing and a burning anger – and he wasn’t sure which it was that made his breakfast lurch so precariously on the sea of his stomach. “Took him three years with us to show his true colours. By that time, though, he’d foiled countless missions when we moved against the Bloodrose Legion’s syndicates. And . . . ”

Alternis could see a speech forming on her lips before the words came out; he’d learned, in his week by her side, to read her expressions like stage instructions. But if he sat with the director’s own script, words highlighted and familiar pages dog-eared, Edea seemed to fumble through her own motions like some mousy understudy, struggling to fill her skin once more. It struck Alternis, then, how hollow she’d become in the past few days. Though he hadn’t known her long, he found himself missing the firecracker of a girl he’d first been partnered with.

It wasn’t much, but Alternis snaked an arm around behind her, not quite letting his hand fall at her side. It was a blink-or-you’d-miss-it movement – like everything they did – but even so, Edea leaned back against his arm, and he felt her straighten. “Fiore DeRosa hurts people,” she finally stated, voice sharp once more. “He does wretched things, and he doesn’t care who gets caught in the Legion’s crossfire. If he really is involved with Tiz and the Pope, it’s more important than ever we find out what links them.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you when you first came in.” For those split seconds, earlier, Yew had abandoned his shrimpy deference for that prodigal confidence hackers everywhere seemed to share. Now, though, he’d retreated back into the shadows, and he’d let that hubris free. “There’s some information that doesn’t exist in code or behind firewalls. Sometimes, you have to go to the source. After you returned from Gramercy yesterday, I reached out to an old friend of mine – oh, don’t give me that, Edea! You know I have friends – er, this girl I met from when I was pursuing my doctorate in Sagitta.”

“You have a doctorate?” Alternis could hardly help but blurt the question out. “But you’re, like, twelve.”

Yew’s scowl was a squiggly affair against his round cheeks. “I’m _twenty-three_ ,” he snapped. “And I have two. One in mid-century cryptography, and my backup, in zoology.”

 _Yesterday, we made you get us_ Starbucks _!_ Out of all the ugly truths forced into the hotel room’s cool light that morning, the idea that Yew – _Dr. Geneolgia? Dr._ Agent _Geneolgia?_ – was so aggressively overqualified seemed the most intent to rub salt into any number of wounds. Still, when Alternis met Edea’s eye, he could see a smile dancing at the edges of her lips, her eyes bright.

“Smart _and_ popular. Yew, you’re killing me over here.” If Edea was animated, Janne was beaming, and his grin didn’t slip, even as Yew made a show of rolling his eyes. “So who is this mystery source? And what can she tell us about these Bloody Rose people?”

“We’re about to find out,” said Yew. “Agent Magnolia Arch is picking us up in thirty minutes. She’s got us on the same train upstate as the Pope.”

Florem City was some two hours south of the village of Sleepy Hollow, and the train they’d crammed onto to get there was one Alternis could only describe as _“cranky,”_ lurching over gaps in the rusted tracks and rocking violently against those iron rails. It had been Magnolia’s idea for them to get out of the city, and away from the Daybreakers’ prying eyes, but Alternis missed his hometown already. Sleepy Hollow’s tourist website promised rustic charm and homemade scones at the inn the Agency had transferred them to, but Alternis had a hard time imagining floral wallpaper and cobblestones holding a candle to the perpetual rush-hour of the city – or the safety that came of feeling he was at the heart of the action.

“Technically, the action’s moving with us,” Edea pointed out, when he voiced the thought to her. They’d decided to share a train compartment, and she was sprawled over one of the green leather benches, her long legs flush with the sliding door. “I mean, isn’t the Pope’s gala going to be in Sleepy Hollow?”

“Brightbrook House, yeah,” Alternis confirmed. The historic manor was to be converted into a museum documenting the lives of its former inhabitants – the Rockefeller oil tycoons, ironically enough – but reconstruction was not slated to begin until the new year. For the last weeks of December, it was still the property of the Players’ Club, and they’d turned its great ballroom over to the Pope for the Crystmas season (no doubt, Alternis thought, to the chagrin of house staff who’d been so close to never having to set foot in the place again). _Their_ official website promised forty rooms on fourteen hundred hectares of land, which read to Alternis like a how-to manual on how to perform water torture. It was going to be the Duke DeRosso’s palace all over again, he knew; he could only hope that with the four of them on ImInt duty, it would actually get done this time.

 _Make that the five of us._ Alternis had to stifle a groan as a knock came at the door, though he wasn’t sure if it was one of irritation or bruised fatigue. Either way, the sound was dead in his throat by the time his hand came to rest on the doorknob, wrenching it open as he plastered a smile to his face. “Agent Arch!” trilled Alternis. He’d decided that the verve – extrachipper and borderline stupid though it made him sound – was as good a way as any to smooth out the wrinkles he and Edea had pushed into the fabric of their relationship with Magnolia.

Magnolia, for her part, met his fake smile with one that could have belonged on cereal boxes nationwide. This close, Alternis could see a millimetre of Juvéderm resting quietly in her lips and smell the telltale traces of fresh polish on her nails; he could hardly help but feel grubby in comparison: sticky and halfway childish, curled in the corner of his own bench seat with his chin-length hair in uneven white shocks. Still, she’d been the one to push into their compartment. Alternis found himself straightening in his best Edea Lee as Magnolia slid the door shut behind her.

The real Edea Lee, though, didn’t need good posture for her confidence to shine through. Alternis watched her arch an eyebrow as Magnolia pushed inside. Though she was the one dressed to the nines, Edea commanded their tiny cabin like it was her own personal throne room. “Hello to you too, Magnolia,” she deadpanned. Alternis was hardly surprised to hear his partner press the first-name basis – but all the same, when Magnolia did not answer, Alternis resigned himself to interjection.

“So, do you two know each other as well?” he ventured. He was thinking of how easily Edea had first dismissed Magnolia, back at Gramercy Park, but they both shook their heads.

“Not really,” Magnolia piped up, after a beat. “But Interpol owes MI6 a great debt. We owe . . . ” Here, her expression softened. “We owe Agent Lee’s foster father a great debt.”

“You can just say _‘father,’_ Mags.” Edea was quick to roll her eyes, but Alternis was slow to match her distaste. He’d never quite pictured Edea as someone who might even _have_ parents. No, she seemed to have come from nowhere and to belong to no one; while Alternis knew such pretences ran thin even for people as invisible as him, Edea had seemed so wholly detached from any world outside the one they shared that the news came as a cold kind of shock. Still, Edea had moved on. “You do, though,” she was agreeing. “Owe us, that is.”

Alternis watched something cool and mean flit across the planes of Magnolia’s face. “Right,” she agreed, at last. “Well, I just wanted to come by to let you know your identities are secured for Agnès’ gala.”

“Oh?” Alternis felt himself frown. Janne had spent half an hour on the phone with the Marshal, and Yew with Agent Heinkel, but neither had been able to secure fake identities that did not risk raising any of the countless red flags littering their mission. Magnolia only shrugged.

“‘Oh,’” she confirmed. “Metropolitan Opera star Angelo Panettone is giving his last performance of the season the night before the gala – so congratulations, Alternis, you’ve just been cast as the title role in _Don Giovanni_. Edea, you’ll be spray-tanning yourself into his girlfriend, Olympic archer Aimee Matchlock.” The smile Magnolia offered them this time was wry. “Unfortunately, the lovely couple is going to be coming down with ipecac poisoning on the night of the twentieth. But, you know . . . don’t tell the Pope.”

Alternis could hardly help but laugh. The plan sounded more like a schoolhouse prank than an intergovernmental rescue mission – something he half-feared, half-hoped was going to set a precedent for the entire operation. Across from him, Edea’s lips were twisted into one of her crooked grins. Alternis had found he’d come to cherish the sight of them: Edea had a way of making it seem as though her levity commanded all the light in a room.

As it was, though, she let it fall as Magnolia exited once more. “That’s her off, then,” she sighed, stretching her arms above her head. “I’ll not lie, Alternis, I can’t be _doing_ with this mission much longer. I need my beauty sleep.”

“You look fine, Edea.” Her gaze was expectant, hovering between teasing and demanding, and Alternis found himself laughing once more. “Okay, then, you look _great_. Wonderful. Radiant.”

“‘Radiant!’” Edea clapped her hands together. “I like that.”

When her giggles finally faded away, Alternis was rather reminded of soda going flat: he was left with the impression that something vital had faded from a situation otherwise all too sticky. Ordinarily, he craved silence, relished it, but he found himself now scrambling to fill the air between them. “So!” came his voice at last. “Your . . . father, huh?”

For a moment, Alternis could see that hollowness tugging at her features again, and he watched Edea’s eyes widen, as though searching for stability when the floor beneath her was no longer quite solid. Before he’d even the time to wonder if it had been the wrong thing to say, though, Edea was composed once more, curling into the corner of her seat.

“I did say I was raised into all of this,” she gibed, voice dry. Slowly, a sad sort of smile stretched across her face. She reached for her cell phone, and turned it toward him; as the lock screen came to life, Alternis could see a grainy picture of a younger Edea standing next to an elegant man. He must have been Yunohanan, Alternis supposed, all hooded eyes and dark hair, and his narrow face was drawn in a loving kind of exasperation next to his daughter. The Edea in the picture was skinnier, less toned than the one in front of him now, and she wore a bright pink helmet and matching skates.

“Roller derby,” she laughed, when she saw him staring. “I was a local _champion_.”

“Do you still do it?” Alternis wanted to know. Edea shook her head.

“No time.”

Alternis’ next words came out without his thinking. “We should go,” he blurted out. “When all this is over. Get our minds off things.”

“Oh?” Edea’s eyes were narrow, her smile tentative. “Do you skate?”

“Not even a little.”

This time, when the hush settled over their tiny compartment, Edea was the one to rush to break it, all breathless words and bony, jerking movements. “Nobutsuna Kamiizumi,” she announced, seemingly out of the blue. Then she deflated. “That, um, was his name.” Alternis’ _“I’m so sorry”_ had barely formed on his lips before Edea added, softly, “We buried an empty casket.”

Wordlessly, Alternis moved to sit by her side. He knew that emptiness all too well: he knew how the aftermath of declaring someone _“missing in action”_ came as surfing a tidal wave, how draining it was to chase highs of hope further and further away with each passing day. But he also knew there was no ripping that bandage off. So instead, he nudged Edea in the shoulder, as she so often did him. “About that beauty sleep . . . how ‘bout you get some shut-eye?” Alternis knew his _“casual”_ sounded constipated on his best of days, but something grateful was shining behind the glittery tears dancing in Edea’s eyes.

“Says you,” she shot back, a weak hiccup bubbling up and through the line of her smirk. “You look like you’ve been dipped in Tipp-Ex, Dim.”

Absentmindedly, Alternis reached to the skin below his eyes, feeling his lashes tickle his fingertips as they brushed skin he knew would always be that sleep-deprived purple. “It’s my look,” he decided. After a moment’s pause, he reached for the zipper of his jacket, swirling it from his shoulders as he stood. “It’s cold in here” was his tepid excuse, and Alternis thought it best he pretend not to notice how Edea tugged it to her chin like a blanket.

“Thank you.”

Alternis would have grinned, if he’d had a jacket collar to hide it behind. Instead, he crossed the threshold with a patented silence, and edged the door shut behind him.

Janne was hardly the only person in the train’s restaurant car, but the way he lounged across his folding chair, nursing his cocoa with a cynicism he was decades too young for, he might as well have been. He’d known Alternis long enough not to expect much more than a weak nod from across the room as he trudged across that ugly eighties carpet. Still, Alternis did snap to life, if only for the moment, as he sat down across from Janne – and didn’t immediately hear the squeak of another chair at his side. He’d grown to expect, if not wholly depend on, the idea that Edea would pop up at his side; the hours they worked together really did stretch into years when she was the only constant.

But for now, Alternis would be content to call a double espresso his partner. He knocked it back the way Janne had taught him to do tequila.

“Yikes.” Janne’s own voice was raspy with underuse: Magnolia had been quick to snatch Yew up when she’d first come to their hotel, the two of them gabbing in rapid-fire to Sagittan – both too quick and entirely too _fluent_ for Janne to get a word in edgewise. Alternis gave him a groan of a laugh, setting his forehead down on the veneer of their table.

“Trouble in paradise?” he asked his friend. “Has poor Yew come down with . . . ” He fumbled for a joke, and settled, after another shot of espresso, on, “Is he with Magnolia?”

Janne’s best comeback was his sneer, and his voice was a symphony of snarls as he spoke. “Look who’s talking,” he sniffed. “Where’s Susie Q?” He paused, and a wicked smile danced at his sharp-boned face. “And where’s your jacket?”

“Don’t even,” sighed Alternis. He could feel prickles of heat pressing at the hollows of his cheeks, and he watched Janne lunge for the bait, cooing,

“Do you like her, Dim? Like, do you _like her_ like her?”

Alternis thinned his lips. “Do you like your _skeleton_ , Janne? Like, do you _like it_ like it?” He batted his eyelashes, linking pinkies with his friend. “Because I will break every bone in your body if you keep acting asinine.”

“Alternis, you know I’m about as scared of you as I am my _abuelita_. Who’s dead.” Still, Janne seemed duly chastised. His dark eyes were downcast when Alternis spread his hands.

“We’re just . . . well, we aren’t in school anymore, you know? We’ll hit Sleepy Hollow in half an hour. And then we’re on our own. We’ve got a mansion to case and conspiracies to unravel, and a _Pope_ to hide from . . . ”

“And we’re flying in blind?” It was Janne’s turn to take a drink, knocking back his hot cocoa as though it were something so much stronger. “Chin up, Ichabod Crane. We’re going to rescue Tiz. We’re going to land on our feet.”

Alternis, who had once introduced himself to the most powerful woman in the world as an aid worker named _“Ringabel,”_ had quite literally never believed anything less.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i marathoned the speed movies on my flight home the other day and i really want to write another chase scene, but i just . . . can't fit it into the chapters i've planned


	6. Wreck-less

Brightbrook House was a sprawling affair in the moonlight, all shadows and soft shapes where its sandstone walls jut up from the thin dusting of snow across a lawn that was manicured, but dead all the same. It had been built at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Alternis knew, and he couldn’t help but wonder if the heavy wood around the house had been cleared for as long: if the untamed pine forest had been missing an entire, fourteen-hectare clearing for as long as the United States had been a country. The thought was a galling one. The elegant junipers lining the gravel paths may have cast long shadows over the silvery grounds, but as Alternis melted from the woods, he could hardly help but feel like some discarded bishop stuck on the enemy colour’s squares, being shoved haphazardly about a chessboard by someone whose only experience of the game came from _“Baby’s First Checkers._ ” For someone who so prided himself on being invisible, he was rather a sore-thumbed sitting duck, now.

Edea was waiting for him on the walkway, rocking back and forth on the heels of her running shoes. She’d swapped her usual Ann Taylor preppiness for a black turtleneck and matching tights – the closest, Alternis supposed, that she’d get to an actual catsuit. As he approached her, Alternis watched her tuck her thick blonde hair under a ski cap. All of a sudden, she was that much harder to find. He’d been following the faint golden glow of the starlight off her ponytail, and now, Edea seemed only a tiny dot of a face in a sea of dark colours.

“Took you long enough,” she called to him, by means of _“hello.”_ Her words clouded in front of her face, and Alternis felt a pang of empathy as she blew on her (gloved) hands, trying to warm them up. He’d lost feeling in his own fingers ages ago.

“Where’s your vest?” he asked instead, gesturing to his torso. Done up in a blend of Kevlar and ballistic nylon, with thin gel pads between layers of that bulletproof fabric, the impact vest was standard kit for field operations like these. Whether they were shot at or they fell off of a roof, Norzen Horoskoff’s only venture into the world of fashion design was there to ensure that field agents didn’t break _too_ many government-owned ribs.

Edea’s shrug was stiff. “Under my top,” she grumbled, and flicked up the hem of her turtleneck as though to prove it. “The Velcro kept sticking to my arms. You couldn’t have gotten me a vest that _fit_?”

In truth, he could not: chances to ask for Agency help were running thin. When they’d informed the Marshal they were moving home bases once more, he’d all but blown a gasket, insisting the trail they were leaving was all their still-unknown mole needed to do some serious damage. He’d had a point – but Edea’s face darkened whenever the Marshal came up; Alternis far preferred the way she flushed in exasperation, anyhow. So he smirked. “I could have sworn you and Janne were the same size,” Alternis teased her. Sure enough, Edea’s nose wrinkled, cheeks blazing. Alternis considered batting his lashes to press the point, but decided against it. His eyelashes were long, especially for a boy’s, which meant the snowflakes melted and re-frozen at their edges promised to scrape at his skin every time he blinked. Instead, Alternis began sliding forward along the gravel, careful to brush the stray pebbles back into place after each step. “Are the lawns’ security cameras disabled?” he wanted to know. Edea straightened.

“You’re welcome.” She flashed him a fleeting grin, and Alternis watched her blow a bubble of some sweet-smelling gum, letting it pop against her chapsticked lips. “Yew said he couldn’t get into the mainframe with everything else going on,” she elaborated, “so I took care of them the old-fashioned way. Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit,” she added. “ _TM_. It’s a classic for a reason.”

Alternis shook his head. His own lips were cracked and dry in the midwinter air, and when he smiled, he could feel his skin crack into ravines. “You’re something else, Edea,” he admonished. Then he knit his eyebrows. “Janne and Yew,” he began. “What _are_ they doing, instead of helping us?” Edea pulled a face.

“Haven’t a clue,” she sighed. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably somehow involves the word _‘anal.’_ ”

“You’ve gotta love them, huh?”

“No, Alternis. You really don’t.”

There might have been motion sensors regulating the spindly iron lamps lining the gravel path, but Alternis and Edea managed to hug the shadows their whole way to the door – or, at least, Alternis did: flitting from side to side, tumbling carefully along the edge of the walkway to avoid offsetting any sensors. Edea simply reached to her utility belt and unfolded a crinkling silver sheet, holding it high above her head.

“Bounces the infrared rays away,” she told an upside-down Alternis. “Learned this one on _Mythbusters_.”

“Shame you haven’t picked up any of their one-liners, Jane Bond,” he scoffed in retort. He popped silently to his feet, brushing icy stones from the folds of his own impact vest – tailored, he might have added, to the lithe lines of his body. Alternis had been happy to play mannequin to Kikyo and Dr. Horoskoff when they’d first designed the thing, if it meant he could get a prototype that actually fit.

Edea rolled her eyes. Her turtleneck was lumpy around her middle and squished flat against her chest, and against her flickering scowl, she seemed a Cubist etching as she dropped to the ground: _Picasso’s heavy period,_ thought Alternis, and decided to file the gibe away for later. “Pressure sensors on the mat,” she was saying, gesturing to the grand double doors. “We could scoop up some snow, pull a Poisson-Tidwell?” She was referring to an old manoeuvre where an agent would blow an increasing stream of powder over the strain gauge rosettes of the pressure sensors, calculating the correct volume off of something called Poisson’s ratio – but there was hardly the time. Alternis thinned his lips before reaching to his own utility belt. The grappling hook was carbon-fibre, the rope synthetic spider silk. It had been Janne’s Crystmas present to him last year, but there weren’t many jobs where he got the chance to use it.

“We’d make great thieves, you know,” he mused. Edea had elected to climb first: she was stronger than he was, and her aim for the portico was true. She was a blur of grace and grit as she scaled the four-odd metres off the ground, and he scrambled to keep up.

“We would.” Edea leaned against a second-storey window as though it were the door to her school locker. “But I’d miss flying first class for free all the time.”

There were four storeys to Brightbrook House, and the pair of them made short work of the top three. They’d equipped a cam-contact each – being, as it was, that Alternis was running low on ones that still _worked_ – and moved back-to-back alongside one another as they took careful recordings of each of the rooms they moved through: making sure that Yew, if and when he got around to it, could use the video to make a model of the manor’s floor plan. Button cameras pressed to the corners of bathrooms and side parlours would be feeding constant optics to Janne as he worked mission control, so that he could keep them noted of their marks’ positions (and keep them out of sight of a Pope who had decidedly _not_ invited them).

The ground floor, though, came as a different story. Alternis felt the air – already chill – drop one, two, twenty degrees as they padded from the parquetry of the drawing room to ballroom’s gleaming marble. He felt almost marmoreal himself. The thin flashes of golden-tan skin he could see between the hem of his (black) sleeves and his (black) leather gloves were rigid with gooseflesh, and an old soreness was sinking into his movements, dragging him stiffly across that chessboard pattern.

 _Chess again,_ thought Alternis, half-absurdly. _I never was good at the game._ The Marshal had tried to teach him, when he’d first been recruited. It was back when he still smiled, on occasion; he’d called Alternis _“son”_ rather than _“Chameleon,”_ then, and laughed when Alternis insisted on promoting his pawns to any number of ridiculous new positions. (The _“royal dressmaker,”_ for instance, could move at the Queen’s heels, and the _“jester”_ could jump, but only over the King.)

Those fleeting images of the Marshal, all stony elegance, were quickly dashed. Edea had flitted out onto the dancefloor, shaking her long hair from her balaclava. “It’s warm in here,” she complained. Alternis stared at her.

“Are you insane?”

Edea didn’t miss a beat. “Maybe a little. But look.”

He followed the line of her finger upwards. A lattice of gleaming metal covered the frescoed ceiling. At first, it was the dark shapes of spotlights that caught Alternis’ eye, their shadows shifting with the slow breeze passing in from the window they’d cracked open – but there were stationary shades, as well. _Security cameras._ Alternis didn’t need his cam-contacts, though, to see that there were no blinking red lights: they weren’t recording.

So what purpose could they serve?

Edea answered his unspoken question with a collectedness Alternis knew she only half-felt. “Someone else is going to be keeping visual on the gala,” she decided. “What are the odds they’re on our side?”

“Next to none.” _We’re not necessarily that likeable._ Alternis frowned, placing cold hands on his hips. “If they’re not on, we might as well do some countersurveillance and take them out now,” he decided. “Come on, pass the grappling gear. I’ll give you a lift.”

Edea’s only answer was to pop another bubble of her gum, and to press the spool of rope into Alternis’ hands. It was his turn to lasso the damned thing, apparently, and Alternis’ hands shook: this, he knew, was Edea testing to see whether he was as good with the rope as she’d been.

Suddenly – though not for the first time – Alternis was glad Janne wasn’t with them.

Relief flooded his system when he heard the telltale _“clink!”_ of the hook on metal, and Edea’s smile was one of gentle approval. Her eyes were dancing, even as she jumped for the rope – it was a different matter to climb it without the momentum of a throw to propel one forward. “All right, then,” she was saying, “boost me.”

The edge of the rope dangled uneasily at its vertical, and Alternis willed it (in vain) to hang still as he moved to close his arms around Edea’s waist. She wriggled to face him, leaning forward just as he made to lift her up.

“Are you sure it isn’t warm in here?” she whispered. This close, he could have counted her freckles, even in the dark. She had a low nose, Alternis had noticed, and those scattered dots across its bridge made it all the lower; it made her all cheekbones and eyeliner as she squinted down at him. He could only roll his eyes.

“Just get climbing, Medusa.” She scoffed as she moved to begin her ascent – but as needles of a flush began to rise under his skin, a new thought began to nag at Alternis’ mind:

 _Maybe it_ is _a little warm after all._

Their Sleepy Hollow inn had been cramped even before Agnès’ stream of A-list guests had begun to trickle into the town. By now, two days after they cased Brightbrook, Alternis felt he could barely move for glimpses of faces from the Agency’s watchlist or the _Forbes_ magazine’s _“30 Under 30.”_ The intricate floral details of the halls’ cream-coloured wallpaper were blurred by clouds of hairspray and perfume, which seemed to leap every time a dark oak door slammed open or shut. Alternis had to swallow the urge to duck into the collar of his sweatshirt as he moved through the corridor, not wanting to offend the people darting in and out of the rooms; instead, he elected to breathe heavily through his mouth, and it made his voice come out strangled as he called through the door:

“You decent?”

“What, like, morally?”

Alternis decided to take the call as a _“yes,”_ and slid the door open. Edea had moved into the room he’d previously shared with Janne, as their ground control team took up residence in the MI6 room across the hallway – it had better Internet reception, according to Yew. Alternis supposed they needed the smoothest connection they could get.

Still, Edea’s countless garment bags had multiplied like dandelions in a fresh-mowed garden, and strew their brightly coloured contents with abandon over the room’s only bed (Alternis was, once again, sleeping on the sofa). It was in the middle of that rustically patched quilt that Alternis found his partner, shivering in a spaghetti-strap top and tiny shorts with her arms high in the air.

“Has it dried yet, do you think?” The self-tanner Edea had sprayed on (in their only bathroom) was one that was supposed to come off with a wash, so that an agent could lose the sunkissed legend as soon as they wore it out. Unfortunately, it was also notoriously sticky, and Alternis saw that Edea’s best formalwear lay waiting in thousand-dollar piles all around the codfish-white lines of her legs.

“I doubt it. Do you want me to get the hairdryer?”

Edea rolled her eyes. “Only if you’ll be dropping it into the bathtub with you,” she simpered. But she brightened with a crooked smile. “Then, _that_ wouldn’t have much effect if you’re already dead. Honest, love, you look like Caspar the friendly ghost.”

It was Alternis’ turn to sniff. He’d Googled some pictures of the man, and the Metropolitan’s Angelo Panettone was far paler than he was; he’d applied Edea’s alabaster foundation liberally, but it was to little avail. Alternis resolved he’d have to hide behind the swoop of his hair, sprayed into artful silver waves.

Still, he came to perch at the edge of Edea’s bed, and gave his silk handkerchief a few weak waves at her. She stretched her slow-baking arms toward him gratefully – but then her tiny smile warped. “Ouch!” she cried. Alternis felt his eyebrows knit.

“Sorry,” he was quick to say, folding the fabric back into his fist. “Er, what happened?”

Edea said nothing, but she turned her shoulder toward him. Even through the layer of the tanner and the maze of her freckles, Alternis could see the way an angry red rash clung, burr-like, to her skin; stretching spindly fingers across her collarbones and the curve of her neck. One patch was brighter than the rest, where the handkerchief had brushed her skin, and Edea blew on it halfheartedly.

“It was the bloody vest,” she muttered. “Couldn’t move with it _over_ my clothes, and this is what it does to the skin _underneath_.”

“You got the rash from your, ah, bulletproof vest?” Alternis’ mind was racing, all of a sudden, but he couldn’t quite place why – and its gears ground to a halt, besides, when Edea stuck out her tongue at him. She was all childish crabbiness as she dismissed him _“just as thick as you look, you_ him _-bo.”_

“Yes,” she finally relented, “that _is_ what I said.” She paused, a delicate frown creasing her brow. “Why?”

Alternis felt as though his tongue was made of cardboard, and it poked at his cheeks as he fumbled for the last vestiges of the thought. “No reason,” he sighed, in the end. “Have you tried aloe?”

“Not yet.” Edea lowered her lashes, flashing him a coy look. She twisted closer toward him, letting the edge of her top ride up against the flat (and red-raw) planes of her stomach – though her arms were still in the air. “Want to help me put some on?”

Alternis gently pushed her hands away from his face. “Was that a line, Lee?” he had to know.

“Depends.” She was unabashedly bold. “Did it work?”

Alternis turned wordlessly for the hall once more, and it wasn’t until the door closed behind him he informed Edea that he’d meet up with her later. Janne had his suit, after all, and Alternis supposed Edea would want privacy when she changed (and dried) besides. Sure enough, Alternis found himself greeted by Janne’s expectantly groaning voice as soon as he pushed into the room across from his.

“You’re late,” he was quick to decide. “Come on, get dressed.”

“We have two hours until we have to even catch a car,” Alternis began, but Janne was having none of it.

“You’re doing Lee’s makeup, too, remember?” It was only one of a thousand reasons Alternis, transparently blond and wallflower-wiry, was known as the _“Chameleon:”_ he was a dab hand with a contour kit, even where plastic noses were involved. And so Alternis let himself fall still as Janne bustled to the armoire, presenting a garment bag with a flourish. The tuxedo was a custom Tom Ford affair, and to Alternis, _“flashy”_ was an understatement: the fine-combed wool of the tailcoat was shot through with navies and deep purples, making the dark fabric gleam like an oil slick, and the only thing shinier than his white bow tie were his shoes, polished so neatly Alternis could see his every grimace in their surface. But Yew, hunched over his Blackberry, reading texted instructions from Magnolia, insisted it was all on-brand for Angelo.

“Don’t tie the tie,” he called. Their little Daedalus sat cross-legged at the centre of his labyrinth of tech, but his voice rang out high and clear through the small room. “Angelo never does – says it cuts off his voice.”

“It’s not as though I’ll be _singing_ , Geneolgia,” maundered Alternis. Janne bristled across from him, eyes narrow.

“Why not?” he demanded. “We all know you can.”

It took more willpower than Alternis was, well, _willing_ to admit not to bury his head in the quilt and groan – indeed, the only thing to really stop him from doing so was the notion that he’d already done his hair. “I told you that in confidence, Janne.” And even then, it was a truth only prompted from him after four shots of the Marshal’s best whiskey, at some New Years’ party back at the turn of two-thousand-and-shit. The Witherwood Home, where he’d grown up, had been a religious institution, and its matron had been quick to enrol Alternis in their local temple’s choir. Opera training in the city’s richer districts had indeed followed, and Alternis had kept the practice up well into his military days – though few skeletons were left of his musical career, now. Aside from a scratchy solo in the Marines’ chorus’ rendition of _“I Don’t Know, but I’ve Been Told”_ and the fact that he sometimes allowed himself a few bars of Strauss in the shower, Alternis _didn’t_ sing. He told Janne as much, and Alternis watched his friend heave a great sigh, capturing more of Angelo’s patented diva in a heartbeat than Alternis had all day.

“I wouldn’t rule it out, is all,” was all he said. “Might be good for cover.”

Alternis couldn’t see how an impromptu opera performance would in any way make him more invisible – but he left the bow tie undone all the same. 

It was almost half an hour before the heady silence shrouding the room stirred: with a sharp knock at the door, the kind that Alternis knew could only come from a particularly sharp kind of girl. Sure enough, when Edea nudged the door open, she was all angles and long limbs: she seemed, even in the dull light, to be built along the crisp, clean lines of a paper doll.

“How do I look?” she wanted to know, closing the door delicately behind her. Alternis’ mascara was still drying, which was why, he told himself, he did not dare to blink.

But mascara or no mascara – and, on Edea’s end, spray-tan or no spray-tan – Alternis could hardly deny his partner had grown into herself with a fiery kind of elegance: one that did not necessarily flare and leap the way her moods did, but that commanded attention all the same. Even the rich red silk of her dress and gloves seemed to shine from within, the burgundy burning crimson in the light. The slit up her skirt was one Alternis had to tell himself was tactically designed – coming up to the top of her hip, a line that brushed past her elbow (was she _only_ leg? He _had_ to wonder) it was certainly revealing enough to promise the gala’s other guests: _“There’s_ no _way I’ve got a gun under here.”_

Knowing Edea, of course, and watching the way she carefully pinned the hem of that deep V-neck ever so slightly higher, she definitely did.

Edea cleared her throat, and Alternis watched her rack her mind for a joke to break the hush. “Look, mum,” she finally said, pulling at the slash of her neckline, “no bra.” She shot a wink to Alternis, whose fingers strayed to the cam-contacts’ case in his lap. He supposed that as long as no liquids and silicones were involved, he couldn’t quite complain about what she was or wasn’t wearing.

Janne spoke next, and at his voice, Edea’s crooked smile grew floodlight-bright. “You’re gorgeous, She-Ra,” he was gushing. “People’s hearts will skip a beat at the sight of you.”

Alternis’ own heart was in his throat, but Edea was right on cue. “Crystals,” she laughed, “I should hope not. There are only so many heartbeats that ought to ‘skip’ in a row – I learned _that_ the hard way.”

When Alternis did raise his voice, he regretted that he could not blame a bow tie for making it come out so strangled. “Get something to cover your neck,” he instructed Edea. “Don’t want powder on that dress.”

“No,” she agreed, “it _is_ a favourite.” She reached a newly tanned arm back to Yew, who bolted from his perch on his bed to sling a cream-coloured stole around her shoulders. The fur was faux, Alternis knew, but it still made her look all the more Cruella de Vil.

The thought sent another rush of warmth to his cheeks, and he shook his head hard to clear the images dancing across his mind; by the time Yew’s phone had been flung into his lap, a folder of reference pictures of the real Aimee Matchlock ready, Alternis was half-dizzy.

But he moved for a sharp stick of kohl with a terse, businesslike quiet all the same. For a moment, on the corner of the bed, Edea was stiff: her eyes were narrow with expectation, lips – too pink against her Aimee-brand tan – pursed in the tiniest of frowns. It seemed to Alternis, though, that a soon as he noticed the change, Edea was back to her old self. She leaned in for her makeup with a practiced patience, only ever moving to make a snide remark as Alternis changed brushes or smeared latex across her cheekbones.

Their work was over as soon as it had begun, and just like that, Alternis was relieved to see, the transformation was complete: the spell was broken. Gone was the wintry blonde he’d picked up on the continent. In her place was a grinning athlete, as clearly Luxendarcian as Key Lime pie, her lips a bloodstained red and her profile sharp under the shadows of false lashes. Even Edea’s eyes were uncharacteristically warm – and brown, instead of icy blue, under their double-layer of contact lenses.

“Well then. We-e-ell then.” Edea’s Luxendarc accent was good, but it was a far cry from Aimee’s southern drawl; Alternis watched her seesaw back and forth between lazy syllables until she found a voice that fit. Then she took his hand.

“ _Well_ then,” said Aimee Matchlock, “let’s catch us some bad guys, _darlin_ ’.”

Being a secret agent – a spy, to put it crassly (though, Alternis reflected, to also butcher the term) – was a lot of things: it was scary, it was exhilarating, it was a more breakneck, challenge-mode interpretation of international security, for when suit-and-tie diplomacy just didn’t move fast enough. But more than anything, Alternis had learned, after three years of black ops with the US Marine Corps and after four with the CIA, that field work was a game of _“don’t”_ s. _“Don’t get caught,”_ read their most repeated rule, but there were others, as well: _“don’t mingle when you don’t have to,” “don’t mix up your legends,” “don’t forget to moisturise.”_

Most of all, though, field work came down to one main principle:

_“Don’t hesitate.”_

Alternis had last found himself on the threshold of the ballroom’s grand double doors almost forty-three hours ago, and then, it had struck him as cavernous. He couldn’t have been sure if it was their matching black stealthwear or their cold, clammy hands, but Alternis had rather felt as though he and Edea had been staring down the maw of some shadowy beast: some video-game ultra boss from whose jaws only the quickest of operatives could hope to return.

Now, though, the ballroom was nothing short of dazzling, and Alternis wished that he had the time to gawk. Those spotlights – so jarring, before – washed the polished marble in a rich golden light, glittering off the white squares of that checkered pattern and making the darker ones shine from within. Rich red carpeting lined the sides of the room, and another surrounded an elegant dais, where a string quartet played resonant Crystmas hymns. What struck him, though, was that the room was _alive_. The musicians’ song was played in harmony, it seemed, to laughter and chatter stringing the gala guests together, and already the monochrome of the floor was cut through with flashes of colour where ball gowns fluttered and dancers dipped.

By the time Alternis felt his heartbeat – subdued, as though to make way for the splendour of the party – catch up to his movements, Edea had dragged him halfway across the floor. She’d taken the liberty of linking his arm through the crook of her elbow, and Alternis could feel the cool silk of her gloves shift under his fingertips each time she turned to wave to someone calling Aimee’s name. _Her name,_ thought Alternis. And it was with the archer’s dull, dish-soap drawl that Edea spoke at last, pressing Alternis close to her side to hiss:  
“Ten o’ clock.”

Alternis tightened the focus of his cam-contacts with a flutter of blinks, but had to spare himself a few more as errant silver curls brushed past his eyes. When he’d finally managed to zoom in, he had to bite back a startled laugh, his voice tight as he whispered into his earpiece. “It’s Tyrannosaurus No-Sex,” he heard himself breathe. “King of the fossil fuels.”

“Either Tiz Arrior was never invited to this gala,” Edea remarked, her voice soft, “or the Pope is a very optimistic woman indeed.”

Qutd ad-Din Qada was one of those men who somehow managed to look exactly like one predicted: a stock image of himself, as it were, his tailcoat straining over the expanse of his waist and his eyes beady under a sheen of sweat across his forehead. He wore a sneer Alternis had a feeling he never wiped clean, and though the last shock of his dark hair was pressed smooth – likely with oil his own company had dug up – it seemed his hairline was inching away from that grimace and those piggy eyes, trying in vain to escape. There was a part of Alternis, hairsprayed and stiff in Angelo’s tuxedo, that felt he ought to wish it luck. The rest of him was silent, in wait for Edea’s cue.

It came as a clap on the shoulder, that cold fire of her eyes burning even behind her contacts. “All right,” she decided, “we’ll take this as a three-pointer – get Magnolia on the line.” Alternis’ clenched-jaw cry of _“Agent Arch!”_ had formed on his lips before Edea was even done speaking, his thoughts rattling like ball bearings in a spray can as the two of them fanned the floor. _Don’t hesitate,_ he told himself, time and again. 

_And don’t fuck up._

A _“three-pointer,”_ as Edea had called it, was a standard procedure for an arrangement like theirs. It meant that one lucky volunteer took the eyeball on the target, her partner took backup, and the foreign cop that the team’s hacker went to grad school with (or else, any other third party available) stood by on reserve, watching to determine when the two field workers ought to rotate positions. And Alternis knew the _“standards”_ had earned their spots at the classics’ table; indeed, they spent fifteen minutes straight under the cover of small talk as Qada dazzled diplomats and divas alike. But by the time Magnolia’s voice crackled over their earpieces for the eighth time with the order to _“Switch!”_ Alternis was beginning to feel as though they were wasting their time. The oil mogul might have been greasy, and there might have been blood on his hands, but so far, he’d yet to do or say anything to imply he knew Tiz was in danger – or that Agnès would be next.

“This is getting us nowhere.” Edea spoke tightly through her megawatt smile, and Alternis could feel her muscles twitching under the silk of her gloves. “And there’s nothing out of the ordinary on our other visuals, either.”

Alternis believed her, but began blinking through video channels all the same. One by one, blurry footage from each of Brightbrook’s rooms danced across his field of vision – and aside from the gilt bathrooms, none saw any traffic. It was as though the ballroom was some quarantine zone, all of the gala’s guests come down with some dangerous case of the bougies. He could only sigh.

“Lobo, Daedalus, do you copy?” he barked into his earpiece. He didn’t wait for an answer. “Can the two of you divert all visual attention to the miscellaneous rooms? We need to lock down the floor in here.”

 _“Lock it down?”_ Yew, perpetually high-voiced and higher-strung. _“Why, has something happened?”_

“ _Nothing’s_ happened,” said Edea darkly. “And that’s what’s bothering us.”

Alternis’ shoes were just a little too tight, and they pinched his toes as he rocked, back and forth, on his heels. He was stuck on that chessboard again, it seemed, but there were no promotions, no bishops, no jesters, now. He was a pawn. The countless potential movements of every other piece on the board ought to have stood out to him, he knew, bright, clear lines tracing patterns across the floor – but all Alternis saw now was a headache in the making.

Across the room, the string quartet drew _“Crystals Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen,”_ to a close, raising a polite smattering of applause. “Great,” muttered Edea, “now we don’t even have background music.” She couldn’t quite roll her eyes under the lenses, but she cast her gaze skyward, and the trailing edge of her falsies – cut at rounded angles, to disguise the shape of her sharp eyes – lagged a few flutters behind. “We need a distraction,” she finally resolved. “You know, pull a _Hamlet_.”

“Kill our uncles?” Alternis had never been one for literature.

“No, stupid,” Edea was saying, “we stage some grand diversion and we see who acts suspicious – you know, keep an eye out for people who are monitoring the crowd instead of watching, well, _us_. It tells us their priorities, and with any luck, those priorities lead us to the middlemen between Qada, the Bloodrose Legion, and Agnès. That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Alternis considered making some joke about the free champagne, but in the end, he could only nod, mind reeling once more. That was it – the champagne!

“Edea, your drink.” Alternis didn’t do _“commanding”_ very well, but he’d learned its innate impatience from the best of them: the Marshal, of course, and Edea herself. He watched her lips part in confusion, before narrowing in understanding – and then pursing as she pressed her mouth to champagne flute once more, leaving a lipstick stain. Aimee Matchlock, apparently, was not a classy woman.

But as Alternis threw back his shoulders, feeling, then, how much better the tuxedo fit when he did, he resolved that Angelo Panettone might not have been all too proper himself. The walk he adopted as he stumbled out to the centre of the floor was one Edea would later dub a _“swanker:” “You know,”_ she would say, _“when a wanker swaggers everywhere.”_ All Alternis knew to seem was drunk, Edea’s glass dangling from limp fingers. “Dearest,” he crooned over his shoulder, “I’m sure nobody would mind. Would you mind?” This was directed to the shorter of the two violinists at the dais, a stooped woman with skin like old leather. Her balk was cold and empty, but Alternis would not be cowed. He _knew_ cold, after all: he’d seen the way the snow slashed at their windows on the taxi ride to the gala and he’d dragged their barebones team through the Eternian winds during the brisk dawn of (the failed) Operation Crystal Ball. Most of all, he thought, then, of Edea – of how much like December itself, she would whirl from something cozy and inviting to something frigidly deadly in a heartbeat.

Too slowly, Alternis realised he was staring: that under the dull grey machinery of his last cam-contacts, his gaze crept dully over that thousand-yard landmark, his features slack. He tried for a smile, and – though he didn’t drink on the job – took a swill of Edea’s champagne, careful not to smear her lipstick. At the thought, the grin came for real, and it stuck as he caught Edea’s eye across the ballroom. Her understanding had dissolved once more, it seemed, her mouth a pert _“O”_ as he _swankered_ across the dais. Alternis decided he’d wink.

 _Anyway,_ he thought, _here’s_ Wonderwall _._

But it wasn’t Oasis’ groaning mid-nineties ballad that followed his carefully slurred cry of, _“Aimee, this is for you!”_ No, Alternis found his hand at his chest, his fingers brushing the silk of the bow tie he was suddenly glad not to have knotted. The violinist from earlier did not seem duly impressed – but then he cleared his throat and dug deep, and even she fell in line with her colleagues.

“ _La donna è mobile_ ,” crooned Alternis, surprising himself, he would wager, far more than he did any of Angelo’s lookers-on. “ _Qual piuma al vento – muta d’accento, e di pensiero_.” His vibrato might have been more of a warble, and neither wobbled quite as much as his spine did, the Lincoln-log catches of his vertebrae melting into Jell-O with each halfhearted word.

But even as she wove through the crowd clouding before him, Alternis could see that Edea’s eyes were shining. _Woman is flighty,_ he’d sung, in his best Duke of Mantua. _Like a feather in the wind._ In the eighteen-hundreds, Verdi and Piave’s libretto might have been groundbreaking – he wasn’t sure people actually talked _about_ women back then, other than in terms of dowry. What Alternis did know, though, was that whether she was Aimee or Edea – _his_ Edea, he had become inclined to think – those old Corellian words seemed to take on a meaning they hadn’t held for him since he was in middle school.

“ _Sempre un amabile, leggiadro viso: in pianto o in riso, è menzognero_.”

_In tears or in laughter, her pretty face is untrue._

_At least, in that dress and with that spray tan, it is._

An overtly tipsy Angelo finished his bravura to whistles and laughter, but Alternis’ movements were stiff as he tumbled back down to the carpet across the floor. He hadn’t sung like that since – since when? Since before the Marines, probably, and all of a sudden, his breaths seemed too shallow for the expanse of his lungs, even bound as they were under that name-brand suit. A smile might have been starting at either corner of his mouth, but it could not work itself past his burning cheeks, especially not as he found himself mobbed by self-purported fans of Angelo’s spontaneous musicality.

 _New rule of field work,_ Alternis berated himself. _Do hesitate._ Don’t _open your mouth._

But he couldn’t hate his voice forever – not as another rang out behind him, brassy and bold. “ _Rigoletto_ ,” it came. “I suppose you would have had enough of _Don G_.”

Looking at her now, Alternis had to wonder how he’d ever confused Edea for Praline à la Mode. Even when she’d hidden under all that tulle and all those sparkles at the Yulyana gala, Edea had carried herself with a canny blend of determination and dignity, her posture just prim enough to disguise the impulsive young woman it carried. Praline, on the other hand, seemed to have fallen just short of _“catlike”_ and settled on _“over-boiled spaghetti:”_ her limbs were loose in sequinned sockets, and she moved as though she were constantly being flung from surfaces on which she might lounge. _Stand up,_ Alternis longed to tell her, old drill sergeants’ voices pounding at his mind.

But he was silent, and he watched as Praline’s smile purposefully did not meet her too-blue eyes. “ _La donna è mobile_ ,” she was musing. “Is that not usually a tenor’s song?”

“Maybe I have the range,” said Alternis coolly. _Maybe I don’t need AutoTune to hit an A sharp._ He took another sip of Edea’s champagne, staring down his nose as he’d Googled Angelo doing in countless interviews. With his star-studded, Kellogg’s champion of a girlfriend, Angelo might have been eased from his shell, but all the champagne in the world couldn’t crack that exterior when he did not have someone to fall back on. If Edea’s legend was candy-coated, Alternis was inclined to think, it meant his was made of clay.

Still, Praline was nonplussed. “I might buy that,” she decided. With her eyebrows arched, perhaps she did look like Edea, just a little bit. “That is, if your accent wasn’t more Flor _em_ than Flor _ence_.” She spoke of the city in Corel – that continental capital of all things pizza, pasta, and Puccini – with a slight sneer, which only grew as she went on: “Oh, and if your girlfriend out there didn’t bear a _striking_ resemblance to the woman who stood in as my body double at the Yulyana gala. And if I didn’t follow Aimee on Twitter – meaning I know she’s been live-tweeting her stomach flu.”

 _What do you_ want _?_ The question burned at Alternis’ throat more fervently than an aria ever would, and he had to force himself not to blurt it out. Only amateurs went on the defensive, he knew. Anything he demanded of Praline now would only tell her that he had something to hide.

So he set Edea’s glass on the tray of a passing waiter, and reached idly for his bow tie, knotting it loosely around his neck as he searched for the words. “ _Vaffanculo, stronza_ ,” he finally decided.

If she really had been listening, Praline might have noted, then, that Alternis spoke with the somewhat _Orsterran_ accent of someone whose knowledge of Florentine culture began with Friday night Papa John’s and ended with Janne Balestra’s theatre-kid enthusiasm for _West Side Story_. But while Edea may have made a passing Bluejay, all those nights ago, the jay herself was no intelligencer. She could only stare.

“Ex _cuse_ me?” she snapped. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“Why, it’s Corellian.” Alternis arched an eyebrow, and let it hang, his eyes narrow. “And in a word?” In a word, he’d suggested the pop star try something that began with _“F”_ and ended with _“off,”_ but he gave a relenting smile. “In a word,” he tried again, “it means ‘goodbye.’”

He’d intended to swap one covergirl for another, but as Alternis bounced from disapproving _“tut-tut”_ s from the gala’s elder patrons to _“Wild, dude”_ s from its younger ones, he discovered quickly enough that Edea was nowhere to be found. Once or twice, Alternis thought he caught a flash of that red silk, or heard a snippet of her laughter – but every turn brought another pang of disappointment. Without a song to hide behind, he was struck by how bright the spotlights were, both literally and figuratively; every pair of eyes to skip over the rumpled silks of his legend seemed to drag a burning blade behind them.

Alternis had just made it to the refreshment table, hands clammy around a shot glass of gazpacho, when his earpiece crackled. “Medusa?”he wanted to know; then, more earnestly, “Edea, where are you?”

 _“Suits— scattered— back rooms.”_ Edea might have ditched Aimee’s accent, but it served only to garble her voice further as static burst from the comms line. _“—read? Do— you— me— Chameleon?”_

Alternis could only hope that the flash of red at the edge of his cam-contact display was Edea, and not a low-battery warning. Fingers flitting across the earpiece’s tiny buttons, he barked for Janne and Yew to come online. “Do you have her visual?” he demanded of them. “Her status?”

 _“She followed a group of businessmen from the ballroom,”_ said Yew at last. Alternis felt the signal sputter and pop between Yew’s words, and he could only imagine their techie hunched over one of those laptops, typing like the world (and not just the mission) depended on it. _“They left as a group during your, ah, performance. Nicely done, by the way. You’ve a set of pipes on you.”_ Alternis could hardly imagine a world where he saw fit to fix the comment with an answer. _“She’s on the top floor,”_ Yew announced, after a beat. _“I’m switching your video feed to the map of the house. Servants’ quarters, can’t m—”_

Whether Alternis couldn’t _“miss it”_ or couldn’t _“mess up,”_ he’d never know: Yew’s audio cut out as suddenly as it had arrived. This time, though, it was not with the snap, crackle, pop – _Ha! Rice Krispies,_ thought Alternis, absurdly – of Edea’s poor signal: it was with a sudden shrill ringing boring into his eardrums.

Alternis had suffered a few concussions, in his day, but he’d never had tinnitus.

He’d heard dread described, in the few novels he cared to read, as something of a _“sinking”_ feeling: a notion that one was moving further and further from the light, that hope was there just beyond the surface. But this felt nothing like that. Instead, as he craned his neck toward the ceiling, Alternis felt his shoulders collapse under an icy weight, his ribs constricting in a cold vice around shallow lungs. The dread came to him as a mantle, a dentist’s lead apron, and it made his joints ache as he took in the pastels of the fresco above him . . .

. . . and the fact that the security cameras – which they hadn’t quite been able to see the other night – were trained in their gum-covered glory on a dance floor nobody dared to leave.

 _“I follow Aimee on Twitter,”_ Praline had said. How many others did the same? And how many of them were expecting a bait-and-switch as the feds closed in on the spectre of the Bloodrose Legion? Alternis all but flew up the spiralling staircases, but with his heart and his throat and despair closing in around it, he could hardly move fast enough.

The fourth floor of Brightbrook House was all long hallways and hardwood floors, and Alternis’ footsteps echoed with pounding resonance as he turned corners. With the audio signals to his earpiece jammed, he had little choice but to blink like a madman through channel after channel of video feed. No Edea there, no Edea there – Crystals, why had they even put _up_ so many cameras? What were they hoping to find? Alternis barely knew the confines of his own mission as he barrelled down the halls – but he knew their enemy’s. They’d never been tracking the Pope.

_They’d been tracking us._

_“ . . . talking to you, poppet.”_

The voice to echo down the hallways was saccharine, simpering – and rich with an accent hovering between Al-Khampis and Eisenberg. _Qada._ The despair might have hit him with the sudden alacrity of some _Looney Tunes_ anvil, but it would not relent: instead, Alternis felt himself being pulled closer and closer to the floor as another voice jeered from around some corner.

 _“It was a good line, too, doll.”_ That voice had to be Luxendarcian, but from where? Who? Alternis hugged the wall as he crept forward, but it was of little avail. Against the echo and the blustering winter winds, the speaker could have been anywhere – anywhere, that was, except the pit of hell Alternis wished he’d be pushed into as he pressed on, _“I asked, ‘Babe, is your name_ Medusa _? ‘Cause you make me rock hard.’”_

“I gave him that one.”

According to _House & Garden _magazine – of whom the Marshal was a devout patron – the dividing moulding between wooden siding and wallpaper on a wall was called a _“Dado rail.”_ This, Alternis supposed, was what was digging into the space under his ribs, wind-chilled splinters catching on his jacket as he turned stiffly on his heel. _Dado._ Dead _-o._ For the first time in years, as Alternis watched the shadows of the hallway glint around a telltale silver shape, he wished he had a gun.

“What do you want with her?”

Dr. Horoskoff had designed the cam-contacts with countless tiny lightbulbs, so that an agent would never be caught in the dark. Sure enough, though the corridor was shrouded in gloom, Alternis watched a figure blink into place once their padding footsteps crossed into the cameras’ range. There was a mop of red hair, there was a sharp-slicked goatee, made all the more devilish by the man’s even smile. But what truly made Alternis stiffen was the tiny red brooch at the man’s lapel: a bloody rose.

“With _Edea_? Nothing. She’s harmless – I worked with her long enough to know.” The smile widened, just a little, and Alternis felt his stomach churn. To say they’d walked into a trap would imply there’d been a plan. They’d just been _stupid_.

“It’s nice to finally meet you, though, Alternis.” The tiny _“click!”_ of the hammer being pulled on that pistol – _a Beretta,_ Alternis noticed, _just like Edea used at the gala_ – came as a sharp interruption to the hissing _“S”_ at the end of his name. Alternis had to wonder if he’d planned it. He looked the type.

“Oh,” the man went on, “but where are my manners?” Alternis debated on whether or not to quip that _they’d_ likely been left in the gun locker, when he felt the steel brush against his temple: shooting ice through his veins, if not a bullet – not yet.

His breath was hot on Alternis’ neck, bow tie or no. “My name is Fiore DeRosa.” (As though Alternis didn’t know.) (As though he could have been anyone else.) “And you, little Chameleon, will be coming with me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> alternis is a baritenor and a bottom . . . siri send tweet


	7. Flies Off the Wall

_In the desert sun, every streak of dirt, every mote of dust against the Plexiglass of the van’s window took on a life of its own. They were silver and gold against the tin of the landscape rolling by outside, and every time the van staggered over a pothole or the remnants of a landmine, Alternis watched them dance: watched the light spray against those dull brown shapes and scatter their contours against his vision._

_They were not the only thing to scatter. His breakfast – half of a Rip-It and a dry brick of noodles (they were out of water) – had not quite made it down his constricted throat, and Alternis was sure could feel that buzzing sugar and those spiky crumbs digging into his flesh. The fact that his tongue was as dry as the sand outside didn’t make them go down any better._

_Crystals, but the_ sand _. It wasn’t just outside: it was under his nails and down the reinforced seams of his fatigues, it clung to his eyelashes, grinding as he blinked. To Alternis, it seemed that the earth itself was trying to leave a message: perhaps they could take a Marine out of Harena, but there would always be little bits and pieces of Harena clinging to that Marine._

_“You listening?”_

_Einheria Venus sat shotgun, next to their driver – an octogenarian_ mujahideen _with a face melted by acid – and her grey eyes were blazing against her sunburned skin. “All right, Dim,” she snapped, “get your_ fucking _head on.”_

_Alternis did not stir. He was sprawled out in the back row of seats of their armoured car, his leg flush with its door. The bullet may only have grazed his knee, but the flesh under his camouflage was inflamed, pebbled with clotting blood: Alternis had decided quickly enough he’d not bend it before he absolutely had to._

_Then, wounds or no, his legs were the least of his worries. Camp Shorabak was blurring into view beyond the haze of their dusty windshield, all tent poles and tarpaulins. Alternis wondered what the odds were that a sandstorm might strike, then, and if that sandstorm might blow the whole base away. Perhaps the winds might have blown a tent over his face, strangling him – Alternis wasn’t picky._

_“It wasn’t fragging.” Einheria’s voice was insistent when she spoke again. “He was a fucking monster, and you saved us from him. You hear me? You saved lives.”_

_Alternis could not speak, but he could see his face in the rearview mirror. His dark eyes were bloodshot, and the weak brown of his skin was a sallow (sandy) taupe. Einheria’s own stare was glassy; even with her flaxen hair scraped back and her collar starched (well, that was, soaked and re-pressed in the other half of Alternis’ Rip-It) she still looked every one of her tender nineteen years . . . and not a day more._

_It was with a whispered “_ Mwafaq baâšid _”_ _– Harenan Dari for_ “good luck” _– from their driver that the two of them stumbled from the car, and with a third grumbled curse from Einheria that they made it down onto the asphalt below. Whoever it was that had requested their audience must have been important: the only sand to cling to the runway serving as the camp’s Main Street was that which was sunk too deep into cracks and crevices to clean off. The asphalt was still shining in that power-washer kind of way, and Alternis felt a pang of— not_ rage _, not exactly, but something shadowing it, shoot through him them. They had no water, but the asphalt did._

 _He and Einheria found their Staff Sergeant under the awning to the camp’s only solid building: the field hospital. Alternis had last been there – when? Had it been two days already? Three? The finger hadn’t been_ that _broken, and the plaster around it had dried._ So it must’ve been three, _he decided._

_“Private Dim. Private Venus.” The Staff Sergeant was a severe-looking woman with dark hair and a thin frown, which seemed hardly to move when she spoke. “I trust you know why you’ve been called here.”_

_Einheria scoffed loudly, and though the woman started, ready to discipline her, she only sneered. “Because we had to clean up our Sarge’s mess, and we’re facing the death penalty because of it.”_

_“Not the death penalty.”_

_This voice was a new one, and Alternis had to blink as he took in its speaker. The man crowding through the hospital’s low doorway may have been dressed in an immaculate navy suit, his shoes spick and span, but he looked more at home in the sand than any of the Marines did. Indeed, he looked like some extension of the desert itself, all dappled golden shadows: he wore his blond hair long over broad shoulders, and his face was weathered by a crop of freckles, which crowded around his cold blue eyes to make him seem all the more like a particularly insistent jut of the earth. “Not the death penalty,” he said again, his voice dry as the winter air. “Not necessarily.”_

_“Sir?”_

_Alternis hadn’t spoken since it happened – since he’d screamed,_ “No!” _and dove for Sergeant Khamer – and his voice prickled at his throat as it rasped out._

_The stranger didn’t quite smile, but the slash of his frown softened, just a little, the way the sand did around buried mines._

_“I am the Marshal,” he stated flatly. “And I won’t beat around the bush.” There were no bushes, not for miles. Alternis felt his lips glue shut once more, and Einheria had stiffened beside him. The Marshal didn’t seem to care. “MarSOC’s majors are insisting your actions be labelled treasonous,” he explained, speaking, as though they didn’t know, of their bosses back at Special Operations Command. “But I believe you acted nobly. Bravely. And I am here to offer you not only protection, but immunity – as Covert Operations agents of the CIA.”_

“Rise and shine, Tinker Balls.”

Dodging the tin bucket was a split-second decision that Alternis immediately came to regret. The bucket may have clattered harmlessly to the concrete floor, but his chair did as well, skinning his knees as he fell – and most of the frigid water still hit him, anyway. Under the cuffs binding his limbs, all Alternis could really do was glower. Still, he did so with intent, glaring around the dark spots clouding his vision to the enormous Timberland boots pounding against the floor. DeRosa’s hired Hulk, the one Alternis had heard pretending to chat Edea up at the gala, had been introduced to him as Hayreddin Barbarossa – a surname he shared, apparently, with that freelance driver back in Eternia. Suleiman, as he’d been called, had been Barbarossa’s cousin and his best friend.

Now he was dead by Alternis’ hand.

Barbarossa’s hands were the size of frying pans, and he could close one easily around Alternis’ arm. He wastedlittle time in wrenching both Alternis and his chair upright by that grip on Alternis’ shoulder. The joint creaked in protest, and Alternis could feel it flare in pain . . . but he kept silent. There was nothing to be gained from cursing or screaming.

Still, that did not mean Barbarossa did not try his best. “I got thirty seconds with you before the boss makes it down here,” he was jeering. Slamming Alternis’ chair – and his head – into the cement of the wall and striking him across the chest with the discarded bucket meant he didn’t really have to elaborate, but he did: “And I’m gonna make— ‘em— _count_!”

He punctuated each word with another blow to Alternis’ face, hamlike fists flashing – but Alternis, jaw clenched and eyes squeezed shut, didn’t react to any of them. Though his tongue twisted into the sandpaper of the roof of his mouth and his ears were ringing like the neighbourhood watch hotline on Halloween, his lips never parted. Why should they have? _What would I even say?_ There was a part of Alternis’ mind that had hunkered down under cover of deadpan, and it was the only thing left crying out, by now. _Would I apologise?_ it was sneering, now.That would not do any good. That would not bring Suleiman back.

 _Murderer,_ accused that little voice. Alternis greeted it the same way he did every morning: in silence.

“Easy does it there, Hayreddin.”

DeRosa spoke with the same quiet intent as that tiny fraction of Alternis’ mind, but the similarities stopped at the pitch. There was something more layered to DeRosa’s silky whispers: some notion that every jibe, every barb, was coated in venom, and there to stay, dug deep into Alternis’ skin. (Skin, that was, that seemed to lose some of its elasticity as soon as DeRosa called Barbarossa off, forcing Alternis’ brittle bones to sink down against one another in weariness. _No more,_ they cried.) (There would be more.)

( _Murderer_.)

“Agent Dim, you’re looking poorly.”

DeRosa had his own folding chair with him, and he slung himself across it backwards. Alternis was reminded of a youth pastor – some fresh-out-of-senior-year idiot who dressed casual fascism up with Birkenstocks and Old Navy. He’d spent years launching spitballs and pocket lint at those men, but he was tolerably certain that DeRosa’s punishment for such insolence would not end with a time-out or a call to the matron.

Alternis supposed he might have shot back: _“So are you,”_ he could have gibed. But even if he did dare to speak, it would hardly have been true. DeRosa was all soft shadows and slow smiles in the low-watt institutional lighting, and he preened under the slick of that oily charm: he tossed his glossy red hair, and his dark eyes were dancing. His movements were languid, stalled somehow by the viscous filter he sneered at the world through. Alternis had never felt so small.

He shrugged all the same, as best he could with his arms locked behind him. His mouth was dry, his throat more arid still, but he worked up all he could to spit at his captor’s feet. What did come up was spotted with bile.

“Testy, are we?” asked DeRosa. “I suppose it would take more than old Hayreddin’s messing about to knock some sense into you. Being, as you were—” he paused, his prim expression perverting as his chastising tone broke over the word “—a Marine.”

This time, Alternis could not stop himself from bristling. Y _eah, semper fucking fi,_ he thought, recalling the Corps’ slogan. _Always loyal._ The words burned at his lips, pressed shut by the hooks of the dead skin there, and it seemed Alternis’ tension was not lost on DeRosa: Alternis watched him straighten, puffing his chest forward against the back of the chair. “Shot your CO and still managed an honourable discharge. You’ve got balls, then, Dim.” When he smiled, lips peeling from too-white teeth, Alternis thought he could see a line of powder break over a thin wrinkle in his cheek. If Alternis hadn’t been cuffed to a chair in someone’s cellar, he might have thought it humanising – but he was, so he didn’t. “Must be why Edea likes you so much.”

 _Edea._ Alternis had been shot before – a few times, in fact – which was why he thought with certainty that the name passed through his core like a bullet. Where was she? Had she been taken as well – or was she scrambling to regroup, begging their team to wait on a partner who hadn’t come back? Alternis’ stomach wasn’t likely to knot any further, but it wrenched at the notion.

 _I_ will _come back,_ he wanted to promise her. _And then—_ and this was almost, he would swear, as pressing _—we’re going to rescue Tiz._ Tiz, who may have been in that very same compound. Even before he’d pulled into boot camp, bouncing around the foster system meant Alternis was used to waking up in foreign places – but he doubted Tiz, a country homebody, was programmed along those same lines. Alternis felt he could only hope that ten-odd days in, Tiz had found some stability: that he wouldn’t be tearing at that mousy hair any longer.

Then, _Of course you’d think that. Callous-ass mother—_

Alternis swallowed hard, willing the thought to dispel – but once again, DeRosa pounced on the gesture. “Dear Edea,” he purred, and watched the name sink burning claws into Alternis’ chest. “You know, I really do miss her – but she’s quite certainly moved on, if her diary is anything to go by.” He brightened, giving that catty grin again. “You’ve got to hear this one, Chameleon. She got this MontBlanc pen for Crystmas the other year, and I managed to get a camera installed _in_ the pen. Now, most of what she writes is rather dull, but the night she met you, she—”

“ _Shut up_!”

The roar sent Alternis rocking forward in his chair, and he heard, rather than felt, as his wrists slammed into its back, anchored by their handcuffs. “Shut up,” he growled once more, glaring at DeRosa through a curtain of lank silver hair. His breathing had been laboured since he’d come to, but it was heavier than ever, now, tugging fruitlessly on a ribcage made of iron and lead.

DeRosa only grinned wider, drawing himself up from his own seat. “Thank Crystals,” he was saying, “I was beginning to think that you were mute as well as mutinous.”

Alternis would not rise to the bait, if for no other reason than that he couldn’t: he could scarcely hear DeRosa over the tidal waves of his blood, pounding in his ears. “Don’t talk about her like that,” he spat. “Like you know her. Like you’re worth half of what she is.”

“On the contrary, I know I am. But . . . are you?”

DeRosa had leaned in to ask the question, and this close, Alternis could see his own distorted reflection in his captor’s eyes. The figure staring back at him might have been warped into fun-house proportions, all bloody nose and pencil neck, but Alternis could see one thing clearly: the way the whites of his own eyes were fully visible as he balked. He screwed his eyes shut on instinct, blinking hard in hopes that fresh tears could soothe the sting of the cold air – but the images behind his eyelids were just as gutting as the concrete before them. _“Are you?”_ DeRosa had demanded. _Are you, you murderer?_ Sergeant Khamer hadn’t even been Alternis’ first – simply the first to have a name.

All Alternis could do was swallow once more. In a way, he was grateful his throat was dry: it meant he could feelevery constriction, every twitch of the musculature there as he twisted back into his breathing – and as he spat once more, this time on DeRosa’s gleaming shoes. “Go to hell,” he rasped. DeRosa thinned his lips.

“Testy,” he said once more. He snapped his fingers, and through the blur of the tears he’d worked up, Alternis could see the door creak open. It was just lacquered pine, he saw, and fitted slightly crookedly on rusted hinges. Barbarossa’s enormous hands peeked into view, for a moment, but they only served to set a metal tray of neatly packaged food down on the floor. Alternis found he was only just listening as DeRosa, deftly unwrapping a granola bar, spoke once more:

“I see potential in you, Dim. You will be a great help to us one day – no matter how long it takes me to convince you to cross into the Crystals’ light. Now . . . chin up.” His tone may have been wheedling, but his hands were anything but gentle as he forced Alternis’ head backward and his mouth open, jamming the granola bar down his throat. “We wouldn’t want you starving – that’s always _so_ ugly.”

He whirled from the room in a flurry of hubris and Hugo Boss, letting the door slam shut so hard behind him Alternis felt the sound in his bones. He couldn’t be sure if it was the burst of warm air from the hall outside or his own startled jump that shook the granola bar wrapper from his lap, but it did fall: tumbling lazily down to the concrete below. It settled in a thin seam running along the cement, and a small cloud of dust, already disturbed by the door’s slamming, rose as the paper fluttered.

_Wait._

_Dust?_

Inching himself far forward enough in his seat to actually see the floor was no mean feat: Alternis was short of breath once more by the time he’d managed to angle his body over his knees (and the tattered holes in the slacks over them). But as he blinked the spots from his eyes, Alternis could see that it was not a seam he’d seen at all – but a long, spindly crack forking across the floor. Tentatively, he dug his heels into the floor and inched the chair forward. The metal scraped against the floor in an ungodly screech, but flurries of dust followed in its wake – and better still, Alternis could hear that the sound of the screech was not entirely even.

Though his cheeks were battered and bruised, and his temples pounded with the motion, Alternis had to smile. He had a plan.

_“Well, would you look at that? The menagerie’s all here.”_

_Einheria coloured at the jibe to their codenames. Her Swan Song might have been the leader of their little unit, playing babysitter to their Agent Balestra’s Lobo and Alternis’ own Chameleon, but Alternis knew it was a role she took to with even less gusto than she had late-night minesweeping in Harena. Alternis could hardly blame her: they were not an easy bunch to manage._

_“Crystals,_ ése, _just say ‘zoo.’” In head-to-toe black Kevlar and with his long, dark hair braided over one shoulder, Janne Balestra looked fresh off the cover shoot for a dollar-fifty romance novel. He might have stood half a head shorter than Victor Stein, but there was no doubt as to which of them commanded the conversation._

_Victor only sniffed, pushing his spectacles higher on his nose. The Agency had bribed him away from the glitz and gadgetry of DARPA with a single promise: that his father Vincent would win his gubernatorial race in their home state of Caldisla. As Caldisla was buffeted by the most severe hurricane the States had ever seen and as Victor’s thumbnail scraped his eye, Alternis was less convinced than ever that the Agency had made the right call._

_Still, he stood at attention as Victor pushed and prodded, and brought his hand to his brow in salute when Victor finally flounced back to the helipad. The Marshal had quite literally dropped the tech team at their ground zero before the operation officially began, insisting they be outfitted with that new, DARPA gear: contact lenses that recorded their every move and wireless comms units. Their chief of tech, Dr. Horoskoff, had been thrilled with the new toys for about as long as it had taken Victor Stein to cross the hallway from his own Cyber office to the good doctor’s. By now, two weeks’ worth of improvements later, he’d yet to stop grumbling._

_Still, Alternis supposed they’d come in handy. He blinked slowly as Einheria fussed over Janne’s earpiece, feeling the wafer-thin metal poke at the tender skin behind his eyelids. There was a tiny red spot at the corner of his left eye, and Alternis could only hope it was part of the camera’s display – and not blood._

_“_ Wey, chavo, _you’ve got more nervous ticks than a shoe bomber.” Janne’s grin had always been wolflike – it was why they called him Lobo, after all – but now, it stretched across his sharp-boned face in a way that could only be described as_ “predatory.” _All Alternis could think to do was sneer from under his salute._

 _“He’s in Orsterra for two minutes and he’s already decided he’s a native,” he quipped, folding his arms once more. Granted, Janne_ was _their official tour guide for the mission – but Alternis had not grown up in Florem for nothing. “_ No te adelantes, _Janne,” he finally teased.“_ Sigues siendo solo un Chicano. _”_

 _“_ ¡Cállate, metiche! _”_

_“Okay, boys, rein it in.” Einheria, tall and blonde and aloof, might not have looked at home on the streets of Orsterra’s capital city, but she was more comfortable than any of them in her dark fatigues. She seemed hewn from blocks of ivory and obsidian as she stood there, glaring down at them – her pale face was set and her Kevlar was pressed, and she was unmovable in the sunbaked grass of the prairie. “We have a job to do.”_

_After his tour in Harena, Alternis had thought he’d known_ “dry:” _thought he’d felt the worst of it after dragging himself across those miles of sand and stone. But there had been something forgiving about the desert – some comfort in knowing that he’d simply wound up in the wrong environment. The badlands were more than just arid: they were barren._

_Dead._

_It wasn’t just around him, either. Indeed, Alternis felt as though his tongue had sprouted barbs as it scraped against his cheeks, and his breath was sour against the chapped skin of his lips. When he spoke, his voice was a rattle._

_“I . . . I still don’t think we should do it.”_

_“For Crystals’ sake, Chameleon, not this again.” Einheria turned on him stiffly, and Alternis heard his codename fly from her lips like a bullet: she was drawing a line between them, slapping formality down as another layer of mortar between the bricks of that new animosity. She was a snarl in the shape of a twenty-three year old girl, all raised hackles and drawn lips. “The man needs to be stopped.”_

_“‘Stopped,’ sure. But we aren’t here to_ stop _him. We’re here to stuff him in a bodybag and dump his corpse in the ocean!” Beside him, Alternis could see Janne’s lips part in some unspoken protest, but he could not stop him any more than he could stop himself. He barrelled on: “He’s still a human being! He has a wife! Kids!”_

 _“And he’s an informer and conspirer with known drug lords.” Einheria was the quickest to gear up out of all of them, and now, she cocked her rifle with casual cruelty. “But then,” she went on, voice low, “this isn’t_ about _the Orsterran government, is it?”_ “Click, click,” _went the rifle. “Is it, Chameleon?”_

_“Come on, Swan Song.” This time, Janne’s face was wrought with concern. “Alternis has a point—”_

_“_ Alternis _has a pair of_ raisins _where his balls should be, Lobo!” growled Einheria. “Admit it,” she demanded of Alternis then, wheeling back on him. “This is about Khamer.”_

_Alternis said nothing. There was nothing to say. Eloch Quentis Khamer had been more than a terrible Sergeant, Alternis had learned: he’d been a husband and a father, too, to a woman and twin baby girls who would never know their father had green-lit a massacre on a civilian settlement in hopes of smoking out the warlords holding it hostage._

_They’d never know that a scrawny Private from inner-city Florem had shot him through the brain and shoved his corpse into a sand dune, either. The Marshal had made sure they’d never know_ that _._

_“I’m going in.” Einheria’s voice came to him, then, through his earpiece. She’d made it half a league out into the field before Alternis had come to, and he could barely see her now, yellow grass up to her breast. “We can decide where your real priorities lie later.”_

_But they never would. For while Agent Einheria Venus, codename Swan Song, had been dispatched to that dilapidated farmhouse in rural Orsterra to make sure a two-bit politician named Luche Lazarus disappeared, she was the one never to be heard from again._

“Come on,” whispered Alternis. “Come on, come on, come on.”

 _“Scree-_ thunk _! Scree-_ thunk _!”_

“Come to Papa.”

Alternis couldn’t be entirely sure how long he’d been kept cooped up in DeRosa’s cellar, but the rich wools and silks of his tuxedo had long since begun to stick to his skin, dampened and dried and dampened again whenever Alternis broke out in a cold sweat. Now, though, the dark fabric of his slacks had gone a dull grey at the hems, and light patches trailed all the way up to his knees. Every time he brought his chair down on the concrete again, clouds of dust rose to meet him, and the tiny particles he’d first loosened from the concrete below him pressed like darts into the skin beneath his ruined pants.

Good. It meant he was getting somewhere.

It had been slow, arduous work, too. Though he couldn’t be quite sure how long he’d been in that cell, Alternis was tolerably certain it had been almost two days, now. DeRosa had brought him water four times this far, but food only that once: readily keeping Alternis alive, if not alert. Between that fact and the hours he’d spent recovering from Barbarossa’s piques of rage, Alternis estimated he was coming up on hour forty. If that were the case, he’d spent nearly twenty in all slamming the legs of his folding chair down on that crack in the concrete.

Thankfully, it had finally begun to pay off. What had started as a thin dark line had been forced open over a three-square-inch patch the soil below, an expanse silvery with frost and pebbled with fragments of shoddily poured concrete. It had been that crack to give Alternis the idea: the crack and the dust. Back in Harena, the Marines’ lower ranking men spent their nights off helping the local militia expand camps like Shorabak. They’d been particularly testy about the concrete, and doubly so during the long desert nights, when winter pushed the sand into temperatures below freezing. Concrete poured over a cold surface would crack as it set – and blasting it with hot air in hopes to dry it faster, and in hopes the Marine could make it back to base before the last of the bottled water was given out, made the surface dusty and weak. It was of little doubt to Alternis that wherever he was now had not come equipped with a dungeon when DeRosa and his men had first moved in. It had been a rush job – and by extension, his kidnapping must have been, as well.

 _“Scree-_ thunk _-cru-u-_ unch _!”_

“Finally!”

The chair had been painted a dull, matte black, but once more, Alternis caught a glimpse of silver. This time, it was in the deep groove digging through the steel. He’d managed to force the leg of the chair to bend! Alternis’ system was so flushed with adrenaline he could feel its buzz in his teeth, but yet another wave of energy coursed through his body at the sight. Shaking, slightly, as he moved, Alternis wriggled forward, catching the newly wobbling chair on the lip of the hole he’d made. He dug his feet into the floor to steady himself, and then he pushed further: catching the heels of his shoes on that same edge. His dress shoes came off with a _“pop!”_ , his socks in a tattered, tangled mess of cotton.

If he’d been shivering before, Alternis was bouncing like a kernel in a bag of Jiffy Pop, now; his muscles were bungee cords inside the thin confines of his skin. His legs were bound at the ankles, but he could creep his feet forward, using the uneven surface of the ruined concrete as anchors. And he could close his feet around a large, jagged chunk of concrete, bludgeoning it against the dented chair leg with wild swings of his legs. The length of metal rattled to the floor in minutes, and as his chair topped sideways after it, Alternis felt he could have wept: for sure enough, its endings were long and jagged – and better yet, within reach. Awkwardly at first, then moving faster, Alternis scrabbled for the length of metal with his toes, and stretched his legs back to press it into his bound hands. Wriggling back and forth on the concrete floor may not have been particularly dignified, but Alternis couldn’t care: not as he worked a prong of the chair leg into the ratchets of his handcuffs, and certainly not as he felt them spring free.

When Alternis scrambled to his feet, he was left with the distinct sensation the floor beneath him was dropping, plummeting into the earth below: it had been some time since he’d been so tall, after all, even if his head had not been swimming with fatigue, his blood not running thin. He steeled himself all the same, pocketing his makeshift shim and a hunk of concrete; he brought another down, hard, on the flimsy metal knob of the door. It had been locked from the outside before that, but Alternis was tolerably certain it would never lock again.

“ _Hey_!”

 _Of course Barbarossa’s here,_ thought Alternis with a grimace, _and of course he’s in a funk._ He doubted his voice, after days of dehydration and distance, could struggle to match that pitch, but he tried anyway:  
“‘Hey’ yourself, Wadzilla!”

It was a taunt he didn’t wholly mean. Alternis rather felt as though he’d left his stress-fuelled high with his discarded cuffs; Barbarossa’s stormy voice dug deep into his aching bones, reawakening a patchwork of bruises across his body. Still, Alternis stood tall. Barbarossa was massive, to be sure, but he was also off his guard.

Alternis moved on autopilot. His knuckles were still white around one of those concrete slabs, and he channelled every minute of his Little League days as he wound a pitch aimed at the largest target he had: Barbarossa’s stomach. His aim was true – Barbarossa crumpled in a heap against the tarp lining the wall. The floor below them both was only hard-packed dirt, and Alternis watched it erupt in a cloud around Barbarossa’s slumped form.

Still, there was no time to waste. Alternis kept his head low as he sprinted down the hall, careful to avoid the bare lightbulbs hanging at odd intervals from a scaffolded ceiling; he vaulted like a hurdler over Barbarossa, and slid through a set of double doors marked _“Under construction: danger zone ahead”_ on the raw skin of his knees. He was loath to give it up so quickly, but Alternis still fished his shim from his pocket, and jammed it through the doors’ latches. It would hardly hold Barbarossa long, but he needed all the time he could get.

A flight of rickety stairs took Alternis from that dusty, half-finished cellar to a great atrium of a room, its linoleum floor blissfully cool against his bare and bleeding feet. As he slumped over himself, his breaths short and burning, he forced himself to look around. Long wooden tables were pushed against the dusty brick walls, and the metal skeleton of a salad bar was pushed halfway into the doorway he stood in.

 _It’s a cafeteria,_ he realised, slowly. _I’m in a school._

Or at least, he was in a building that would one day be a school. Upon closer inspection, Alternis could see the tables were wrapped in plastic – and more strikingly, they were free from gum and graffiti. His footfalls – weak though they were – echoed as his aching feet slapped against the floor, the hall hauntingly empty. For a moment, Alternis wondered if he couldn’t just sink down into one of those dusty corners and waste away – he might, then, end it on his own terms.

But the wind was whistling through the sprawling school building, and the floors were washed in moonlight. It might have been abandoned and incomplete, but to Alternis, even the brick of the walls themselves seemed alive with possibility: poised on the knife’s edge of midwinter, ready to tumble into the unknown. This was not a place that would let him die in a corner.

_Besides, if you did, Edea would never let you hear the end of it._

Edea. Crystals, he’d half-forgotten about her – but her image filled his mind, then, all sharp eyes and a sharper tongue; though it had been desperation to force her from his mind in the first place, that desperation – to escape, to save himself – doubled down harder now that it was laced with that jumble of memories. Alternis could practically hear her yelling at him, then: _“Get off your arse, Frankenshit!”_ she might have cried, or, more to the point, _“Move!”_

 _Move, move, move._ That much, Alternis could process.

For an alleged history with MI6 and an ego the size of Hartschild’s Big Ben, Fiore DeRosa proved startlingly easy to find. The yellow tape blocking off the main stairwell was striped not with ink, but with a thick layer of dust: itclearly hadn’t been disturbed in a while. Alternis’ hunt was limited to the ground floor – and even if a warm yellow light hadn’t been spilling from the bay doors of the auditorium, it still would have been the first place Alternis looked. DeRosa seemed the kind of man to be drawn to the stage.

Alternis had to pause, though, as he came to hover at those doors. He could burst in, pop a one-liner – but then what? Every bone in his body was screaming at him to turn tail, his groaning stomach a constant, hollow prayer for him to press into the snow outside and find his way to safety. It was hardly as though DeRosa’s life was being weighed against his own, then: rather, Alternis knew he was gambling with that life of his, pushing it blindly across a roulette wheel of answers he didn’t know the questions for.

And so he shoved the doors open. “Yo! _Ginger_ Rogers!”

By now, Alternis could hardly see two metres ahead of him, exhaustion needling a blurry gauze into his vision – but a flash of red at the edge of the stage told him he’d hit home. “I’m talking to you, DeRosa,” he crowed, stalking down the aisle. “And don’t even think about calling for backup – I left the Colossus of Chodes locked in the basement. Crap job on that one, by the way.” His hands shook as they came to rest on the back of a front-row seat, but Alternis schooled his features, leaning against it as casually as he could. “Really, it’s almost like you were _asking_ me to bust out.”

“And yet, it took you a week.” DeRosa arched an eyebrow, and Alternis noted, then, just how dark it was. His beard was black, as well. The notion that DeRosa’s hair came from a bottle made Alternis stand a little straighter – for the split second it took him to process what he’d heard.

 _A week?_ There was no _way_ it could have been that long – _was_ there? His bravado was a heavy-bag as it slammed back into his chest: a warning not to hit so wildly, lest he get hit back. Alternis had to bite his tongue to contain his spluttering. Instead, he took a shuddering breath. “I’m hoping you used that time wisely, asshat,” he spat. “Like . . . oh, I don’t know. Maybe you found yourself a good reason for kidnapping me?” Alternis spread his hands. “Don’t know if you noticed, genius, but I’m not exactly a Yulyana Prize winner.”

DeRosa swung his legs lazily over the edge of the stage, dropping lightly down onto the balls of his feet. “I wasn’t lying, earlier,” he told Alternis – who only stared. His only memories of the week (week!) that had passed were of his chair, the concrete, and Barbarossa’s fists, more effective than any sleeping pill. “I told you,” said DeRosa, not unkindly, “I wanted you on our side.”

“Bull,” snapped Alternis. “When you want people to work for you, you give them merchandise and—”

“—and legal immunity?” asked DeRosa slyly, his eyes narrow. “Persuasion comes in many shapes and forms, boy. In my experience this way is quickest – and I’d been led to believe you could be broken,” he said, shrugging lightly. “Granted, I was wrong. But it’s no matter.” His pause was a delicate one, and Alternis felt his heart sink as he watched DeRosa flash a coy grin. It was an expression he’d seen on Edea a thousand times – and it was tainted in a heartbeat by this man. “Look around you, Alternis,” chided DeRosa. “Do you see where we are?”

“I see a monologuing madman,” spat Alternis, but indeed, DeRosa was on a roll.

“This time next year, the mayor of Tarrytown will unveil Our Lady Immaculate to his townspeople,” he was explaining. “It will be the first parochial elementary school in this part of the region, and it will offer hundreds of children free education – alongside religious guidance, keeping them from the spirals of drug abuse and violence that haunt rural Luxendarc. At the same time, halfway around the world, its sister school will have opened on the outskirts of Aleppo, Ancheim. The Pope herself is going to teach there, you know.”

Alternis rolled his eyes. “Well, isn’t she saintly?” he sneered. He spoke the gibe with greater conviction than anything else he’d said all day – which was, perhaps, why the word struck him so. _Saintly._ He’d thought the same thing of Her Excellency the first time he’d seen her, at the Yulyana gala all those nights ago. Then, her robes and her jewellery and her resonant voice had struck him as a target. An _“amalgam of shapes that just screamed, ‘Shoot me!’”_

Perhaps they had been.

Alternis’ mind was reeling, blurry images and foggy memories whipping into a cyclone of distractions. The rash. The rash! Edea had sported the same one after struggling into her ballistic nylon. The Pope could have hidden a small child under her ceremonial robes – a bulletproof vest would have been nothing. It was dumb luck that she hadn’t wound up needing it: that the distraction to cause the gala to crumble in on itself had come in the form of Alternis and Edea apprehending that would-be sniper just a little bit too soon.

“She’s saintly,” he whispered once more. “And she’s a _puppet_.” His next words were a shot in the dark – but Alternis was CoveOps. He’d been training his whole adult life to work under cover of night. “Agnès’ schools, her temples. They aren’t just safe havens for persecuted Crystalists. They’re nesting grounds for the Bloodrose Legion.” The auditorium had been draughty enough when he’d first set foot in it, but now, Alternis felt as though it was made of ice. “What’s Qada’s oil money for?”he wanted to know. “A . . . a secret militia? Government leverage? With Tiz Arrior out of the way, you can make an awful lot of changes here in Luxendarc – and Crystals _know_ we’ve already done _our_ number on Ancheim and Harena.”

“So accusatory, Alternis.” DeRosa’s voice was as silky-smooth as his neat dress shirt, so soft the wind threatened to snatch it away. “We are going to help people.”

“You’re a kidnapper and a torturer—”

“—and _you’re_ a killer.” DeRosa took a slow step toward him. “You killed a man in your own army to protect civilians – but then because of it, a dozen warlords went free, as well. You attempted to black-bag a politician, and you lost one of your own. And still, you grind relentlessly at the idea of justice that your Central Command force-feeds you with.” He gave one of Edea’s closemouthed smiles again. “You’ve spent your life failing to contain other people’s mistakes, haven’t you, Alternis?” he wanted to know. “And that . . . well, it’s understandable. We all want control,” he breathed. “The world is a chaotic place, and history is pockmarked with those who sought only to cause more upheaval. But the Dawn of Providence . . . the Dawn is about _order_.”

 _We’re the goodies,_ he seemed to sneer. Though he hadn’t eaten in purported days, Alternis felt sick. “We are a force of stabilisation,” DeRosa pressed on. “And I’m truly, deeply sorry it turns out you won’t be helping us achieve it.” DeRosa draped his hands over Alternis’ shoulders, and he nearly buckled under the unexpected weight. When DeRosa’s sallow finger came to press at the side of Alternis’ neck, he’d already begun feeling woozy: ready to faint before he really succumbed to the sleeper point. When he did, he rather deflated down onto the tile, folding in on himself.

_“. . . something . . . ”_

Alternis couldn’t be sure when, exactly, he came to – evidently, he was no judge of time. All he could really register was the hammering of a migraine at the edges of his skull, and the way his vision swam as he tried to push himself from the floor.

“ . . . on, over here!”

Crystals, the voice again. Why did it sound so familiar? Who . . .

“ _Apúrate_ , Edea, hurry the hell up!”

 _Edea_! And that must have been Janne! The realisation shot like the jet of a fire hose through his veins, but Alternis found quickly enough that his body had yet to catch up. His arms shook as he tried to push himself up, and Alternis heard his shoulders creak before they went out from under him. There was a patch of something sticky on the floor beside his face, and his mouth was drier than ever.

But soon enough, Alternis felt himself being lifted up, up, up, a familiar roughness scraping against his stomach as a pair of strong, Kevlar-clad arms closed around his middle. Janne would not let full tactical gear – or a rifle strapped to his back – stop him from whirling Alternis around in his embrace. “You’re alive!” he was crying. “Oh, thank the Crystals— _Edea_! Get your bad self in here! It’s Alternis, he’s _alive_!”

Janne had buried his head into the crook of Alternis’ neck, and the sight of his friend would have sent Alternis dissolving into relieved tears – if he’d had any to spare. But as it was, though they were narrowed against an insistent prickling, Alternis’ eyes were dry and unblinking as he lifted his gaze from Janne to the doorway of the auditorium. The light behind her was dim, but it caught her golden hair like a halo; in a bulletproof vest tailored to fit her and with her pistol shaking in her grip, Edea reminded him of some modern-day Valkyrie, her beauty a grim one.

But it was not as grim as her voice, so cold even the wind cowed away from it. “I can see that, Lobo. I’m blonde, not blind,” she snapped. She did not spare Alternis a second glance as she turned on her heel, calling out over her shoulder. “So stop messing about and get the eejit in the van, would you? He’s . . . ”

Here she did turn back, and even all the way down the auditorium aisle, Alternis could see her eyes narrow.

“He’s wasted enough of our time already.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> not pictured in the above chapter: the browser window of 18 tabs all pertaining to the physics and properties of concrete, the “sign up now!” pop up from concretenetwork dot com, the fact that i now get email ads for concrete contractors, the


	8. Whodunit

It was the third of the twelve days of Crystmas, and the streets of Sleepy Hollow had never done a worse job of living up to their name. Though a blizzard pounded down on them from above, the cobblestoned paths were crowded with townsfolk: some in ceremonial robes, others in ugly sweaters, and all of them cawing out carols, voices pinched by the cold.

And _Crystals,_ was it cold. It seemed to Alternis, whose leather jacket was straining over two hoodies and a fleece blanket, that the town was buffeted by another burst of wind with every chime of the town hall’s great bell – and it chimed incessantly as the world crawled toward midnight. _Eight, nine, ten,_ Alternis counted. Ankle-deep in snow and with the wind biting at the fragile skin of his face, he felt fresh off the set of _Ice Road Truckers_ : he was weathered and weary, and perhaps most importantly, Alternis knew he was only passing through.

_Eleven, twelve._

Though it pained him to do so, meltwater creeping into his socks and skin waxy-white, Alternis hovered by the frosted glass of the pub door, waiting for the last echoes of the bell’s tolling to leave, and to let his bones still. Tiny shamrocks were stencilled into the reflective surface, and they were rough beneath his hands as he traced his fingers across their outlines – anything to keep him from actually having to open the door. Though the lights inside were warm, shifting and flickering in the dancing shadows of the crowd, the festivities struck Alternis as some horrible labyrinth. _Thanks, Janne,_ he thought – and not for the first time that night. As soon as he’d piled from a much-needed shower and downed a minifridge’s worth of protein shakes, Janne had announced they’d be celebrating Alternis’ rescue at a local pub: the whole thing his treat. The news had spread all the way from their inn to the outskirts of neighbouring Tarrytown within the hour.

“Alterni-i-is! _Céad míle fáilte_!”

The door was flung outwards with such force Alternis was sent skidding backward on the flagstones, and he could feel his bones bumping against the granite. “Yew,” he managed, weakly, “you’re . . . ” _Already drunk._ “Looking festive,” he said, in the end. It was the most generous way he could think to put it. Yew wore an enormous wreath at a jaunty angle over his brow, and his cheeks were flushed a red nearly as brilliant as the Crystmas tree ornaments pinned to his wrinkled blazer. When he smiled, his teeth sparkled like tinsel.

“ _Go raibh mile, Sile_ ,” he hiccupped, “thanks.” Alternis could only assume the garbling language he spoke was Tenebraean (or else, Simlish). He grimaced as Yew grabbed his wrist to pull him up and inside, crying to all who would hear, “ _Nollaig faoi shean is faoi mhaise duit – agus go mbeire muid beo ar an am seo aris_!”

A smattering of amused applause met his words, but they fell quickly back into the disarray of the party to a delicate cough. “He’s got another one, then, has he?” came a painfully familiar voice. “Sorry. Let me just— _oh_.”

Alternis could only think to thin his lips, and as she hovered over Yew’s shoulder, Edea did the same. She hadn’t spoken a word to him for the whole van ride back from the schoolhouse: instead, she’d sat curled in a tiny ball in the shotgun seat, whispering occasionally to Yew as he drove. From his perch next to Janne, Alternis remembered catching her gaze, once, in the rearview mirror; her eyes had been bloodshot and puffy, the circles beneath them a cold violet. But she’d ducked her head into her collar as soon as she caught him staring, and seemed ready to do the same now.

“Edea!” Alternis heard his voice come out at a startled high, and he coughed before he moved on. “You, uh. You look great.”

In his defence, she did. She’d traded her tactical gear for a lacy top and flowing red pants, all long legs and long blonde hair – though longest of all was her pause as she took him in. Alternis longed to see even a ghost of a smile brighten her features, and he felt as though he was looking at some knockoff of his partner when she only scowled, taking Yew by the elbow. “Come on,” she told him, “let’s get some water in you, love.”

Her words were kind, though her tone was anything but. She caught Alternis’ eye only briefly, but he saw her eyes, narrowed to slits, were colder than ever. He’d once liked that about her – prized it, even – but that had been when he’d thought himself on the other side of her cold shoulder, scoffing alongside her. He’d quite forgotten what it felt like: how taciturn she could really be.

Alternis found Janne sprawled across a booth seat, surrounded by chipper strangers, and he couldn’t help but feel that his friend was the only one actually happy to see him. Janne slid smoothly into the corner and pushed a glass toward him, never breaking his chatter, or the levity of their table.

“Got you a Shirley Temple,” he said, brightly, moving to help Alternis from his jacket. “You know, non-alcoholic.”

Alternis’ thanks had barely formed on his lips before they erupted in a gag. “Crystals, man, that’s disgusting!” he spat, nudging the glass away from him. The liquid to slosh over its side was pink, and as viscous as cough syrup – which may very well have been what it was. Janne only shrugged.

“I saw Edea order one the other night,” he said, spreading his hands. “I . . . ” His voice trailed off, and though a gleeful, shrieking laugh from the other side of the booth offered them ample cover, Alternis could hardly help but feel though the silence between them was what was so deafening.

“What?” he had to demand. Janne mumbled something about thinking he might like the offending drink, too, but Alternis could hardly help himself from going on. “And just _what_ crawled up her ass and died?” he wanted to know. “What . . . what _happened_ with her, Janne?”

Usually, Janne’s smiles were mirthful and knowing, prompting laughter all around. Now, he looked either like he was trying to swallow his own tongue or like he was searching for a good way to tell a child their puppy had been run over – whichever option, Alternis supposed, made him more nauseous. “I don’t know,” he finally relented, letting the grimace slip. _I don’t know_ her _,_ he seemed to be saying, but it might have been Alternis’ own imagination that tacked on to the end: _I don’t know her like you do._

“Come on, stay with us,” Janne urged. He gestured to his bevy of new friends, but his voice was thin and wan even as he piped up, “The tab’s on me!”

 _The tab’s on the Agency,_ thought Alternis, and he felt his expression sour. _And if I know you, this isn’t just Agency money – it’s either Tiz’s rescue budget or mine._ Suddenly, the pub – with its worn brick walls and halfheartedly Fenian decor, with its storm of partygoers more violent than the snows outside – seemed wrong, wrong, _wrong_ : it felt as though every inch of Alternis’ skin was crawling, his veins buzzing as his heart pounded away, faster and faster.

 _“Testy,”_ DeRosa had called him. His was a voice that did not so much flow as it _crawled_ : inching over the cracks of his mind with a measured, sticky lethargy. He’d been – well, Alternis supposed he still _was_ – a man who acted like he’d all the time in the world to do much whatever he’d wanted.

 _He_ , Alternis knew, would not have let Edea’s funk get to him.

But as it was, Alternis found Edea swivelling on a barstool in a far corner of the pub, flushed under the glow of a red neon sign. When the couple sitting in the seats beside her moved to leave, Alternis shot for the vacancy, moving faster than he thought his sore legs capable of. “Lee!” he found himself calling. He hated himself for it – hated to burst into her space so suddenly – but he clambered onto the seat beside her all the same, and leaned in, pressing his shoulder to hers. _Please,_ he begged her, silently, _stay put._

Edea’s eyes were blazing, but she knew better than to cause a scene. Alternis supposed the way she slumped over her napkin – folded, he noticed, into a wrinkled paper crane – was as great an admission of defeat as he could ever expect from her. The thought was as uncomfortable as the cracked leather beneath him (half-cold, half-warm, and all strangely damp) but Alternis held fast.

“What do you _want_ , mate?” This time, when Edea spoke, her voice was hollow and dark. It might just have been the light behind her, but Alternis thought her eyes might have been rimmed in red once more.

He balled his fists in his lap, fumbling for an answer – but he never got the chance. Before he could even open his mouth, a grinning man popped up behind the counter, setting a bowl of peanuts and a wad of napkins in front of them.

“Evenin’, you two!” he trilled. His words were bright with a singsong accent Alternis couldn’t quite place, and his great fur stole of a moustache danced with his brilliant smile. “You with the one-man bachelor party over there?” He thrust his (bearded) chin to the booth Alternis had left Janne at, and exchanging an uneasy glance, he and Edea nodded. “He’s wild, but I can’t complain,” the bartender rambled on. “Business is booming. Come to think of it, what are you lot celebrating? Just Crystmas?”

Alternis tried to meet Edea’s eye once more, but she’d returned to her origami, creasing a fresh napkin along sharp lines. More than once, he watched them tear. “We’re, uh, anthropology students,” he finally lied. “Researching the, y’know, folklore of the area. War stories, the Headless Horseman . . . ”

“ . . . the _witch_ _trials_ ,” drolled Edea, pointedly thinning her lips.

“Anyway, our friend back there, he just got published,” Alternis scrambled to add. “In _Anthropological Quarterly_.” The lies slipped more fluidly from his lips now – and even Edea straightened, just a little.

“And you?” The bartender, for all his smiling, did not seem satisfied. “Did one of your research subjects punch you or something, kid?” When Alternis only balked, the man gestured to his own face, and Alternis’ hands flew to the bruises dotting his.

“Oh, you know.” Alternis couldn’t smile too widely before it began to ache, but he tried all the same. “Let’s just say there’s a reason we’re _here_ , and not at Shaw’s around the corner.”

Edea’s hand on his shoulder came as a surprise, but when she dug her nails into the fabric of his hoodie, Alternis’ brief relief flickered. “He’s always acting without thinking, you know,” she snapped, only half to the bartender. “Flying off any old whim.”

“I’m hardly the _only_ one who’s unpredictable,” he hissed back. “You—”

“Well then!” The bartender brought his hands together with a resounding clap. “What, uh, what will it be, you two?”

“Just a tonic water for me, please.” Alternis fixed Edea with a pointed look. “I don’t drink on the job.”

“Tequila,” said Edea to the bartender, flashing a flinty smile of her own. “With a bendy straw.”

Though he’d been all sunshine when he’d first greeted them, Alternis could see the man’s brow wrinkle in evident relief when he set their drinks down in front of them. He could hardly blame him. Stony silence had torn a great ravine between them, and Alternis felt as though he was teetering on its edge, every half-formed sentence on the tip of his tongue a great leaden weight pulling him closer to some unfathomable darkness. With Edea’s face flickering like the neon lights did, that icy anger cracking over a sadness all too real, Alternis wondered if it wasn’t just better to jump.

Once more, he didn’t get the chance. Edea slammed her tumbler down on the counter so hard it cracked, the blue plastic bouncing off the wedge of lime clinging to the glass’ rim. “Well?” she demanded of him, tumbling from her stool. She landed lightly on her feet, though that was all that was light: her gaze bore into him with thundering intensity, and though her voice was tired and tinny, it still bludgeoned at his head.

“‘Well,’ what?” snapped Alternis. “Is that all I get?”

“Don’t be a baby.” When she moved from that neon sign – advertising, Alternis saw now, soda floats _“for two,”_ all fifties, double-strawed charm – her anger moved with her, dissipating into the air only to be crushed under the hubbub around them. Though her jaw was set in a frown, she’d wrapped her arms around her waist; for the first time, she struck Alternis as willowy and frail. She was waiting, he realised: for a sign, for assent, for a break.

Somewhere behind them, people were singing an old drinking song. “And the flea on the feather,” they sang, “and the feather on the chick, the chick in the egg, egg in the nest, nest by the twig, twig on the branch . . . ”It was layers on layers, and it was spiralling out of control just as Alternis did as he moved – as they both knew, deep-down, that he would – to stand by Edea’s side. _Crystals,_ he thought, _when did this all get so complicated?_

But he didn’t ask. There wasn’t an answer.

Edea wove with leonine grace through Sleepy Hollow’s winding side streets, padding across ice and through snow Alternis fell into more than once. He was faster than her, and sure enough, he was hot on her heels when they’d first left the pub – but he was short of breath by the time they reached the curb, it seemed, and Edea never stopped. By the time they reached the squat Gothic buildings surrounding their inn, Alternis could scarcely even see her. If the snow had been insistent before, it was relentless now; though Edea’s crimson coat and matching pants had seemed such a beacon before, the snow piled on her quickly. Alternis felt as though he couldn’t even be sure if she was the one flit toward the inn’s double doors, or if he’d fallen into the glow of a will o’ wisp, some mystical traffic light: only faintly red and gold, if all too clearly a signal to _stop_.

As it was, Edea had half disappeared under the frost dusting her clothes when she came to her own halt, and once more, the fire of her movements and her temper extinguished as her face wrinkled with that fragile frown. “So,” she drawled, “you’re still here.”

“Of course I am,” grumbled Alternis. “I’ve been at your damn heels for the better part of December, now, haven’t I?”

Edea’s arms flew to lock across her chest. “Maybe you would have gotten yourself kidnapped again! How am I to know?”

“You—” Alternis couldn’t be quite sure what he wanted to say, but he could feel it die in his throat. For the past week (a week! It had been a _week_!) his chest had been so tight his breaths could only skim the tops of his lungs, and even now that he was free, safe, he felt as though they were still too shallow, fluttering listlessly in the cavern of his ribs.Perhaps that was why his voice broke over his words when he spoke next. “Is _that_ what all this is about?” He gestured between them with a hapless, half-frozen weakness, wrist loose in its socket.

Edea flared at the motion, swatting his hands away as she pushed off the door behind her. “Of course it is, you idiot!” she cried. “Crystals, Alternis, I . . . ”

Desperation dogged her face, then, and in the silver light bouncing off the snow, Alternis thought she looked like a tragic heroine in some Classic painting: she was all soft shadows and careful details, and her pretty features were blurry – though that, he realised, was just thanks the tears sticking at his eyes. Between the biting cold and the fact that he was back – _safe_ – yet Edea was still so distant, the winter felt all too real, then.

Wordlessly, Alternis slid past her to push into the inn’s lobby, and the clicking of her heels against the hardwood floor told him this time, she was the one rushing to keep up. _Good,_ he thought. _Good._ A powerful, throttling rage had begun to boil against the flattened bed of his core, and the tears had begun to well, now: all the unspoken frustration of the mission had tangled like so many balls of yarn, and they were unraveling so quickly they pulled him alongside them. Crystals, was he actually _physically_ dizzy? Or was that just fatigue? When Alternis, clawing at the hems of countless layers, sank onto the king-sized bed of a room he only just recognised, he felt as though the mattress might very well have swallowed him whole.

He wasn’t quite sure how to feel when it _didn’t_.

Edea shut the door gently enough behind her, but Alternis could hardly help but jump at the _“click!”_ to follow. The last time he’d been stuck behind a door, it had been behind DeRosa’s, and he’d been (incorrectly) counting the moments between Barbarossa’s slugging assaults. Even though he was a world away – and marginally better-fed, now – he could hardly help but feel a grim foreboding settle over the dim room as Edea rocked on her heels, hovering at the threshold.

She was the first to speak, breaking the silence with a bitter laugh. “Look at you,” she spat, as she wadded up her coat. Alternis couldn’t help but notice that despite her words, she _wasn’t_ : her gaze was wobbly, and it flicked from the windows to the walls, to the ash dusting the unlit fireplace. When she flicked the lights on, her shadow stretched so far across the room Alternis rather felt it pinned him to the bed.

 _Well, I wasn’t planning on moving._ He swallowed hard as he wrenched his gaze to catch Edea’s. “What is it?” he asked of her. “Edea . . . ”

“Does it ever stop?” she demanded, suddenly. “I mean, you know that _The Importance of Being Earnest_ wasn’t a _how-to guide_ , right?” Her voice shook, but she pushed away from the threshold, managing a whole three seconds of proper posture before she folded against the fireplace. “Don’t answer, okay? Because I know it’s going to be something, well, _earnest_. Something . . . oh, you _know_!” Alternis didn’t, but Edea was on a roll, now, pulling at her hair. “I can barely stand to be in this room with you,” she finally confessed. “I mean, you . . . you’re always this deer in the headlights, aren’t you? And here I come, some big, clumsy SUV who can’t do anything with tact. Anything _right_.”

“I’ve never thought that,” whispered Alternis, but Edea silenced him with a wave – and then a:

“I said ‘don’t,’ Alternis.”

She folded her arms tight again, tucking into the collar of her top. “Do you know what it was like, with you gone?” He considered shaking his head – but Edea had turned her burning stare on him, now, and there was a part of him that wondered if there might have been more than one reason they called her _“Medusa.”_ “It was terrifying, to be sure. And it was harrowing. And every second that passed, all I could think of was you, dead in a ditch somewhere, with some big, bloody rose carved into your forehead to boot.

“But more than that, it was _empty_. Without you, we’d— _I’d_ lost something really central to this bloody mission. This . . . group. And for what? _Why_? Because _I_ ran off. Because _I_ couldn’t see the signs. The week leading up to that bleeding gala was just littered with my fuck-ups, and I let Fiore follow them like a scavenger hunt. I let him . . . I let him _hurt_ you.

“Do you know the worst part of it, though? It wasn’t the fear, and it wasn’t the fact that I – lo and behold – found that I missed you. It wasn’t even the week we spent raiding every abandoned building this side of the Great Lakes in hopes we’d find you— oh, Alternis, don’t look so surprised. Hell, even that dopey _look_ you get, even _that’s_ not the worst part!” Edea’s hands were tangled in her hairline, and loose curls flew up in golden shocks as she flung her hands in the air. Taut muscles in her throat made a bar code of shadows every time she made herself swallow once more. “The _worst_ part,” she finally said, her voice tiny, “was that we finally found you, and all I could feel was . . . was this jealousy. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘he’s back. But he got his own damned self out. You still let him down, Double-Oh-Dipshit.’ And . . . sure, you might have been back, but my _dad_ isn’t. So many people aren’t! Fiore’s great wankfest of evil doesn’t begin _or_ end with us.

“But then there you are, and I’m guilty all over again. Because how _dare_ I be so caught up in me, me, me when you’re . . . when you’re right here? When you’ve been through hell and you never complain? Crystals, Dim—” and here she laughed, something bitter and rueful “—everything you do just . . . it kills me, you know that? You _even_ look at people like they’re these great archangels to your little Renaissance man self. I—”

She seemed wont to go on – and if Alternis knew her half as well as he thought he did, he knew she wouldn’t stop until the army of storm clouds outside signed a peace treaty with the night – but it was his turn to silence her, drawing himself unsteadily from the bed. “Not everyone,” he heard himself say. It was something he hadn’t known was true until he said it. All the same, it was a sledgehammer of a statement, and he knew the conversation between them was a house of cards: any wrong move would topple it.

So he bit his lip. “I’m pretty sure it’s just you,” he told Edea, softly. “You’re one hell of a girl, you know that?”

“Don’t give me that.” _Don’t, don’t, don’t._ Never before had her walls been built so high. Still, when Alternis reached his hand toward her, she hesitated before batting it away – and she let her hand come to rest on his chest, her pulse racing alongside his. “I’m not good enough for this. For you. That’s . . . er, well, it’s what I’m trying to say,” Edea whispered. “You deserve better than me.”

“Who gives a shit?”

Edea’s hair had come to hang in front of her face, and Alternis reached a tentative hand toward her, brushing it away from those ice-blue eyes. It was an absurd thought, but he felt all the same that their warmth was _in_ that chill: she had a way of making him feel like it was just the two of them, locked away from the frigid winter (especially now that they actually were). “Who cares about who ‘deserves’ what?” he asked again. They were close already, but Alternis inched closer. “I know I don’t. I want _you_ , Edea.” The words were as sugary on his tongue as that Shirley Temple had been, and he rushed to clarify: “I mean, you’re . . . you’re great company. And good fun. And . . . ”

Her hand was still on his chest, but at his words, Alternis felt Edea inch it higher, dragging fire across his collarbones and up his neck before she rested her palm on his cheek. “You ‘want’ me, huh?”

He’d missed her careless smile: the way it wrinkled the freckles across her nose into absentminded zigzags and tugged higher at one eye than it did the other, a wink she wouldn’t let go of for as long as the laughter held. It was conspiratorial, but not the way Janne’s smiles were – Edea’s wild grin simply told him they were in on the same joke.

“You—” she began again, coy and teasing, and Alternis had to press his lips together to bite back the laugh.

“Shut up,” he told her – and tentatively, he leaned in. “Shut . . . up.”

It wasn’t a _good_ first kiss, not by any means: Edea had rushed to meet him, and Alternis could feel their teeth knock against each other as they struggled into a rhythm they hadn’t quite practiced; her knuckles more than grazed his side as she spun them around to push him up against the moulding of the fireplace. But as he balled his fists at her back and she tangled her fingers in his hair, Alternis could hardly help but feel his lips twist into an adoring grin – too wide to do anything but, it proved. He ducked away with a laugh he hoped passed as casual.

“Sorry,” he whispered. They were touching in a thousand places, and every twitch of Edea’s fingers at his scalp and the base of his neck came to Alternis as unspoken commands: he’d all but melted into her, and moved at her mercy.

“Who gives a shit?” she teased him. She was grinning, too, and her twitching lips tickled at his nose as she rose up on her toes to stare him in the eye. Her gaze was burning with equal parts passion and longing, eyes narrow in a silent dare: _“We can do better,”_ she seemed to say. And sure enough, her hands came down to pin him by the shoulders, and Alternis found he was happy to, any jokes left in him reduced to tiny sounds at the back of his throat.

Their next kiss was ravenous, roaming: Alternis felt Edea’s lips travel to his cheek, his jaw, to the side of his neck, and he could only cling to her when she closed her teeth lightly against the skin there. More than once, he felt himself tipping slowly forward, though he barely noticed his shuffling steps moving them off the wall until his knee buckled against the bedskirt. Then, all he could think to do was spin them around to pull Edea over him, and groan, slightly, as her leg slipped between his.

It was over all too soon. Edea wrested her head from the crook of his neck and pried his hands from her back, moving them gently to his lap. “It’s getting late,” she breathed. “Or, early, technically – it’s nearly two.”

Alternis’ hands were shaking, and slightly slick, when he closed them back around Edea’s. “So?” he prompted her. It might have been the hour, or he might (just possibly) have been out of breath, but Alternis heard his voice come out hoarse, half-husky. “You could stay,” he said, turning pleading eyes up at Edea. “Here. Tonight.”

“Oh?”

She’d brought her knee onto the mattress to steady herself, and Alternis felt her inch it ever closer to him, her thigh brushing his hip. When she brought his knuckles to her lips, brushing a butterfly kiss against them with her smirk, his breath hitched. Crystals, she was beautiful. _And if she keeps this up, I_ will _have a heart attack._

All the same, he leaned forward. “Well?” Alternis prompted her. “Do you . . . um . . . ”

“I quite honestly thought you’d never ask.” Keeping his hand in hers, Edea moved to grab him by the collar, grinning as Alternis closed his own fingers around the fabric of his shirt. “Keep at it,” she told him, flashing dimples. She fished around in her pocket for a moment, and her smile widened as she pulled out a lighter. “I think we ought to get a fire going.”

When Alternis woke up, _everything_ hurt.

His skin was dark against the crisp white of the linens, but darker still were the nebulae of bruises stretching across his bare chest, dotted with the faint stars of old scars – and black holes of fresher marks, oh-so-faintly shadowing where Edea had kissed and pressed and bitten at his clavicle last night. The thought sent a fresh wave of heat through his system, but Alternis curled up under the duvet all the same, hugging it close to his chest.

 _Crystals almighty,_ he thought. He could barely move for another aching reminder of the night before: of Edea folded over him as he clutched at the pillows behind them, their every motion rushed and breathless. Now, with the smell of woodsmoke clinging to every surface, some spectre of last night’s fire when everything else was chilled to the core, Alternis wondered if – just maybe – the haste and the crush hadn’t wholly been necessary, and if he might have been less sore in their absence.

A faint grumbling somewhere beside him was just enough to pull him from his reverie. Alternis watched, bemused, as Edea stirred, emerging from behind her tangled hair like some creature from the deep – or some too-much-eyeliner ghost from a Yunohanan horror movie. “Fuck me,” she rasped, shakily propping herself up on her elbows. Alternis had to bite his tongue at _that_.

“Morning, sunshine,” he quipped instead, grinning as she rolled her eyes. She moved carefully as she picked herself from her awkward diagonal across the mattress, as though her limbs were still thawing from the few hours of sleep they had managed to get. It was strange to see: ordinarily, she was so sure of herself.

Still, Edea managed to slump back against the headboard all by herself, in the end, exhaling sharply with the effort. With her eyes still squeezed shut and her spine curled forward – her whole being untangling itself too slowly from exhaustion – Alternis couldn’t help but feel he was intruding on something strangely personal, as he watched her. Strangely intimate.

 _Failed step one,_ he thought, then. Still, Alternis deflated in relief when Edea finally turned back on him, her face bright with the smile he’d been waiting for.

“So,” she began, “that, er, happened.”

“In a good way or a bad way?” he had to know. Edea swatted him lightly across the shoulder, and Alternis relented with a wry smile of his own. “I just . . . I just want to make sure this is something _you_ want,” he offered, twisting against the scattered pillows to meet Edea’s gaze. “If, y’know, we’re really going to do this.”

Her only answer was to take him by the shoulders, and to press a lingering kiss against his lips (and to grimaceafterward and say, “ _Ew_ , morning breath”). Outside, the snowstorm had slowed to a lazy flurry, and the clouds were a soft patchwork in dove and pearl, washing the winter landscape in dappled shades of grey. Alternis had once read that things were supposed to seem clearer in the morning light, but the cluttered room around him was much as he’d left it at the crack of dawn: scattered clothes turning the hardwood floor into a Pollock painting and half-forgotten shoes a challenge to _actually_ get up. Alternis couldn’t be sure if the clarity had dissipated, or if he was simply too slow to understand that it had taken on a new form.

Either way, he groaned as he pushed himself upright, and Edea laughed at the sight. “You look like crap,” she told him, exasperation and affection colouring her tone in equal measure. “And you’re still far too thin. We need to get some breakfast in you.”

“Do you have an Aspirin?” Alternis felt his bones creak with his every motion, muscles about as forgiving as Rebar as he edged himself upward. Edea shrugged.

“Check my purse” was all she said, as she tumbled from the bed, making a beeline for the room’s electric kettle (and likely her bra, which had found a home with the earl grey). Slowly, Alternis leaned (well, sort of flopped) over the side of the bed to rifle through the handbag. It was crammed with pocket litter, and Alternis felt his face fall when his fingers only closed around a single lonesome pill.

“Did I have any?”

“You had a Tic-Tac.”

Edea was speaking again, and Alternis was sure to laugh in all the places she did, but he was only half-listening. Her purse strained at the designer seams with testaments to her character, answers to questions only an agent would think to ask: manicure receipts and ticket stubs from movies and Broadway shows, a tourist’s guidebook titled _“What to do in Norende”_ (which must have been a joke, because there was _nothing_ to do in Norende). All that made up the unspoken legend of Edea Lee—

“ _Ow_!”

Alternis drew his finger from the purse with a string of whispered curses, and he watched in dull fascination as a drop of dark red blood bubbled up at his finger, a thin needle hanging delicately from the skin. “Been sewing, Edea?” he asked – but to his surprise, when she came to sit by his side once more, her expression was stormy.

“Decided I wanted my bulletproof vest to actually protect my ribs,” she said, strangely darkly. It took Alternis a moment, but he found the garment on the rag rug by the armoire. Sure enough, the seams along the sides had been pulled in by a hundred mismatched skeins of thread, glinting silver with button pins.

“You couldn’t ask Central Command for your own gear?” he asked, but he already knew the answer. They would have said, _“Ask Alternis.”_

“You didn’t tell them.” Tentatively, he took Edea’s hand in his, but she was still.

“We had Janne do your check-ins,” she explained. “His impression isn’t great, but . . . what else could we do?” When Alternis turned toward her, he saw her eyes were shining. “I know the Marshal,” she said, softly. “I know Heinkel. And I couldn’t trust that they’d . . . that they’d send for you.”

 _“Athletic, attractive, and anonymous.”_ A good agent was all three. And a better agent was _expendable_.

Anything left of the night’s dancing fire had wiped him clean, then; Alternis’ stomach was a pit even through breakfast, where Edea briskly piled a mountain range of scrambled eggs on his plate and watched him choke down each gluey bite. He barely managed a smile when Janne found their corner table, Yew trailing behind him as they cut through the dining hall.

“Someone’s hung over,” offered Janne, by means of _“good morning,”_ but all Alternis could think was that he half wished he were. It would have been a far more palatable motivation for his building migraine: he’d much rather be able to think the pain was one Advil and hash browns might have willed away. But as it was, only one thought pounded at his mind, tugged on the dead fibres of his muscles, too slow to recover:

_Would the Marshal have left me?_

Four years ago, Alternis would never have dared to doubt the man. The Marshal Alternis had first met in Harena had been a man who smiled and laughed, and who’d made no bones about the fact that his field agents were children – children who he’d take under his wing with little hesitation. The Marshal had been stern and exacting, but he’d known to swap his iron fist for velvet gloves when it was called for. But somewhere along the way, the last thin threads of that forgiving tapestry had snapped, and the whole thing had unravelled; the Marshal was as impassive as a glacier, now, if far less likely to melt.

Somehow, his head had found its way to Edea’s shoulder, and wordlessly, she pulled him closer, her hand cool against his waist.

In the end, it was Yew – hung-over as all get-out, sunglasses perched uneasily over his spectacles – and his irate muttering that pulled Alternis back to life. He set a slim laptop on the sticky surface of the table with a “ _Ní Fheídír,_ ” as though a foreign language would mask his complaints, and met Edea’s “Get to it, Daedalus” with a snarl of “Jaffa witch.”

Only, he didn’t say _“witch.”_

“O-o-o-kay!” Janne sat with a bowl of steaming oatmeal, which jumped at the sharp clap of his hands. “Let’s just rip off the band-aid, shall we? The bad news won’t break itself.”

He spoke the words like a stage direction – for sure enough, Alternis watched the double doors to the dining hall edge open, and a familiar head of ash-blonde hair totter in, followed by a white-robed figure that could only be Her Excellency. They’d been tough already, but now, the egg left on his fork tasted like rubber. Alternis found himself grinding his teeth (whether to swallow his breakfast or to keep from cursing, though, he couldn’t be sure). He’d told the others about what he’d discovered – and DeRosa all but sang in approval of – when they’d first loaded him into the van, and the dread to settle over the fake leather seats was not one of shock or apprehension: it had been an unspoken but all-too-palpable _“We should have known.”_

“Who do we call first?” Yew wanted to know, booting up the laptop. Alternis knew his dry tone wasn’t intentional, but he appreciated it all the same. His insides, from a whirling mind to a fluttering heart to a stomach in knots, had formed a storm to rival the one outside; Alternis needed every anchor he could get.

“Heinkel,” he blurted out. In truth, he’d barely thought of the MI6 handler since they’d first tanked Operation Crystal Ball, but he couldn’t stand the idea of staring the Marshal down – knowing there was no idea in confronting him about that silent ultimatum. “Let’s, uh. Let’s call Heinkel.”

Yew complied without (audible) complaint, and soon enough, the video link flickered to life on the screen. Heinkel’s office was a far cry from the chrome and cold lights of Central Command: the window behind his desk overlooked an elegant, if snowed-in garden, and the wallpaper peeking out between the overstuffed bookcases was a cheery crimson. _“A video call!”_ he laughed, once the necessary paroles and obligate formalities were cleared out of the way. _“It’s been a while since I’ve seen you all. You’re looking well,”_ he added, in a way that Alternis knew meant he didn’t exactly believe it. _“And Alternis! It’s yourself, is it?”_

 _So it is._ Alternis tried for another bite of egg.

Edea was the first to speak, waving her forkful of waffle around for punctuation. “Sir, we’ll cut right to the chase. We have a status update on the Dawn, and how they connect to the Pope . . . ”

She spoke animatedly, and Agent Argent Heinkel made a receptive audience: he gasped and swore and _“a-ha”_ ed in all the right places. With their motley assembly of pyjamas and Heinkel’s guffawing voice, Alternis was rather struck by the impression they were a group of grubby children telling a horror story to some kindly grandfather. The only thing missing was a Father Crystmas beard: Heinkel only had a wispy afterthought of a moustache, and it thinned along the line of his lips when he finally frowned.

 _“The Bloodrose Legion has grown bold, if they have forced the Pope into their ranks,”_ he said, gravely. _“This does not bode well for the religious conflicts already rocking the world.”_

“No duh,” whispered Janne. His voice was just soft enough as not to pick up on the computer’s crackling speakers. “That’s, like, why we called.”

It was, but Alternis couldn’t help but feel like something was off. It was the feeling of wet shoes on a rocky ship, or being stuck in a stuffy car: something that could very well just have been coincidence, a turn of the weather, but could just as easily signalled impending doom.

 _It’s yourself, is it?_ Heinkel had asked – as though there were anyone else it might have been.

“‘Forced.’” When Alternis spoke, his voice was tight. “You say Agnès Oblige was ‘forced’ into the Legion.”

“Catch yourself on.” Yew’s interjection came too quickly to be anything but instinctive. “Are you suggesting the Pope was _corrupt_ — oh.” His face fell. “Yeah,” he said, unprompted, “I see it.”

Behind the screen, though, Heinkel’s heavy brows had knit. _“It’s simply my leading theory,”_ he retorted. If Alternis’ voice had been tight, Heinkel’s was strangled, and that moustache quivered as he set his jaw. _“But I suppose you’ve good reason to be paranoid, Agent Dim, with all you’ve been through.”_

It was a harmless remark for anyone who’d read his file – and a deadly blunder for a man thrust so suddenly on trial. Though the computer display was heavily pixelated, and dim in the bright morning light, Alternis could see all too well how Heinkel’s eyes narrowed, after a beat; see the way his lips parted, ever so slightly.

 _“I mean—”_ he began, but Edea was faster.

“My second night in Eternia,” she began, “my phone died. And because of that, I couldn’t update you on theAgency’s mission itinerary until right before our stakeout. And then – after our cover was blown, and after we were caught in a shootout – we found out that it was at the _last minute_ that the Bloodrose blokes upped and moved Tiz.”

Heinkel’s connection snapped out in a heartbeat, but no action would have bene quick enough to evade that slow, creeping realisation washing over the group. Everywhere he looked, Alternis was met by the same image: wide eyes and thin lips, and white-knuckled fists as breakfast dishes fell forgotten.

“You get a mole, and you get a mole,” breathed Janne, in a halfhearted impression of that reality star. But his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes, and his stare was glassy. “Merry Crystmas, everyone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sláinte


	9. The Dead Line

_SNAFU._

Though often attributed to the sentient khakis of the Luxendarc army, it was the quote-en-quote _“Devil Dogs”_ of the Marines who had first coined the term during the Second World War – and it was a point of pride for even the most pragmatic Corps men; Alternis remembered a boy in his division who’d carved it into the melted plastic backing of his dog tag using a toothpick. It stood for _“Status Nominal: All Fucked Up,”_ a colourful label used by the Marines for anything from spilling Rip-It down their cammies to being ambushed by the enemy . . .

. . . to a blank computer screen and a cold corner table, and four faces drawn in equal parts horror and resignation as yet another storm rocked the mission they’d never wanted to undertake.

“Crystals above as below, hallowed be thy names,” Yew was babbling, pale fingers shaking along the pearled lines of his rosary. “Thy will be— _Edea don’t_!”

Edea threw herself so violently over the table Alternis’ fork got caught in a tangle of her hair, and she shook with rage. “Get back online, you cowardly, patronising, caterpillar-goateed son of a _lizard bitch_!” she was screeching, lunging for the laptop. “I will rip out your spine and hang you with— oi, hands _off_ me, Long Tall Sally!”

Edea was strong, but Janne, tall and broad, might very well have been twice her size; his grasp was white-knuckled on her shoulders as hers slipped from the laptop’s keyboard. “You will pay for this, Heinkel,” she snarled, scrabbling for the laptop as Yew pulled it away. “You weak-willed beaure-crap! You . . . you _cloud botherer_!”

Alternis could hardly be sure who her latest insults were even intended to be directed toward: indeed, her glare did not soften even when he inched closer to her, resting his hand lightly on her knee. She broke from the calming gesture just as fiercely as she did Janne’s grip, and slammed her fist down on the table so hard the plates all jumped.

But even as she bristled, Alternis saw there were cracks to the icy cover of her glare, hesitant tears glistening as meltwater at the corners of her eyes. Suddenly, the last bite of his eggs felt like a golf ball as they struggled down his throat. Alternis knew she’d lost a father already. Even if Heinkel, a clipped case officer, was a poor replacement, he would have been better than nothing.

Alternis knew how it felt.

And so it was he found himself prying himself from his slightly sticky seat. “Everyone,” he began, towering over their group, “hands to ourselves.” When the urging fell flat, Alternis tried once more: “I said _order_!”

His voice echoed like a thunderclap over the sparse population of the dining hall; Alternis felt, rather than saw, as the gazes of a score of startled breakfast-clubbers came to rest on their table. But he simply schooled his features into a blank stare, one that reached leagues further than a thousand yards. Though an agent ought never to have commanded such attention, Alternis was more than CIA, then; _“SNAFU”_ was a Marines term, after all, and he’d step up to the boot role of Sergeant if nobody else would.

_I just hope I make a better one than Khamer._

The thought whipped at his psyche like any of a hundred sandstorms he’d braved back in Harena, but Alternis had settled in deep behind the weather-(and bullet-)proof glass of his calm. “Yew,” he ordered as he sat back down, “get the Marshal on a call. And if that doesn’t work, establish an encrypted messaging system with the Agency’s Cyber crew – we can only assume Heinkel has got eyes and ears in all our standard methods of communication, but he can’t be _everywhere._ Edea—” he squeezed her shaking palm, but only briefly “—go back to our rooms and start packing our stuff – all except our surveillance gear. Until we hear from the Marshal, we have to go black.” She gave a stiff nod, and Alternis had to spare her a thankful smile. Then he was all business once more. “Janne,” he said at last, “you’re with me.”

“Oh? Where to?”

He tilted his chin toward the far side of the room: toward the only table that had pointedly not reacted to Edea’s outburst. Even without stiff frowns or hissed _“Shut up!”_ s, though, it didn’t take a government agent – or a genius – to see that Agent Magnolia Arch and Pope Agnès Oblige did not go unaffected by the words. The soft line of Magnolia’s blouse-clad shoulders had shifted in a way that could only have meant her hands were on her weapon, and the white mass of Agnès’ robes cut a stark contrast from the shadows she’d ducked into. “They have one of ours,” he said, flatly. “Let’s go get one of theirs.”

Magnolia seemed to smile despite herself, stress fading into relief at a familiar sight as Alternis and Janne wove toward her, and she ducked into her napkin to hide it. As such, it was only by the light flickering from her eyes that Alternis noticed her face fell as she took in their expressions. Agnès, for her part, was impassive, her lips pressed thin behind the rim of her teacup. It was to her Alternis decided to turn. Magnolia had sized up the situation before either of them spoke – but so far, Agnès was off her guard.

Well, she was no more _on_ her guard than usual.

“Agent Dim,” she finally sighed, “how may I help you? I told you all I knew the other week.”

“Yeah, well, seeing as it was all bull, I thought we might try again.”

“Your Excellency?” Magnolia’s eyes were bushbaby-wide when she turned them on Agnès. “What’s this about, now?”

All Agnès did was take another sip of her tea, letting the steam billow in front of her face – though it made a poor cover for wide eyes and a trembling frown, and the steam dissipated when she let out a shuddering breath. Still, Alternis would not relent: he kept his arms crossed across his chest, and he loomed over a table he refused to sit down to. It was Janne’s turn to cut in, all smooth accent and kind eyes. For someone so wild, he made a fine _“good cop”_ (if for no other reason than that Alternis was incapable of doing so at _all_ ).

“Your Excellency,” he broached, “what does Fiore DeRosa have on you?”

Though the inn featured countless dead animals above countless mantles, all testament to a rustic charm long forgotten by the Florem City inhabitants holed up in its walls, the yellow lights of the dining hall were harsh and fluorescent – even behind the thick glass of their lanterns. In their glow, Agnès’ features seemed extraordinarily flat; her round cheeks and wide eyes caught the light in such a way she was all angles and planes. She reminded Alternis, then, of the moon: for someone so stony and all-powerful, her visage was pocked with craters of doubt.

“You know,” she breathed. It wasn’t a question.

“Argent Heinkel,” said Alternis, by means of answer.

Agnès took another deep breath, steepling her fingers as she set her teacup down. Alternis’ nose wrinkled as she did. The liquid was dark and cloudy, one of those herbal teas everyone pretended to like, but in all actuality tasted a bit like dish soap. Perhaps some soap might have done them some good. Alternis was no stranger to having a bar of the stuff wadded in his mouth after a mumbled swear, and he wondered, briefly, if the Pope might have been more forthcoming if such threats were on the line.

But as it was, Alternis could only stare as she searched for the words. “Ancheim has not been at war for long,” she said, softly. When she picked up her teacup again, it shook in her grasp. “And compared to other conflicts, like Harena, the media deems our tragedies minimal – perhaps, of course, because ours was a war we started ourselves, without the United States giving us a push. Perhaps because we don’t have much oil. Perhaps because our country was set to shatter anyway.” _“Perhaps.”_ It was such a thin shield of a word. “But all that is not to say that foreign militaries think nothing of us. Indeed, our president has long been an ally of the rulers of the Glanz Empire.” The nation she spoke of was ill-suited to its name: its people had overthrown its imperial _tsars_ nearly a century ago, and was ruled now by the oligarchs and former agents picking up the pieces of the imploded communist regime to follow. “And when Glanz’s people on the ground in Damascus caught wind of the first protests against the president’s regime, they were determined to stop it.”

Alternis had a sinking feeling where this was going, but he choked it down. “We’re CIA,” he goaded Agnès. “We know the history of Ancheim’s civil war—”

“No, you don’t. You know _nothing_!” Agnès’ anger came as a strangled, watery scream, her brown skin an ashen grey as she struggled back down to a whisper. “You Luxendarcians know nothing,” she said, once more. “ _Especially_ not the CIA. You pride yourselves on being the leading intelligence agency of what you think is the ‘free world’ – but you do not stop to consider just how many people are spying on _you_. And in the case of Ancheim, you do not stop to consider how many leaves the Glanz Empire has taken from your playbook: how the families of all from government officials to rebel leaders have been paid off or blackmailed or otherwise coerced into spying on their loved ones, in our president’s fraudulent name.” She drained her teacup loudly, and Alternis could only assume it was to hide her laboured breath; when she lifted her gaze to his once more, her eyes were rimmed in red. “I have devoted my life to helping my people,” she hissed. “I was the youngest Vestal in modern Orthodox history. But until I was fifteen – until I was old enough to even turn to the temples for guidance – I was one of a thousand flies on the capitol’s walls.” She swallowed. Hard. “There is a file,” she finally told them, spreading shaking hands. “I thought all of them had been destroyed, but I was wrong. Somehow, Fiore DeRosa managed to hack Glanz computers, and he found my damned file.”

“Hard copy?” Alternis had to know.

“Thumb drive.” Agnès thinned her lips. “In a locked drawer at Sixteen Gramercy Park South.”

Alternis had seen Agnès under hundreds of labels in as many hours: she’d been the Pope, his mark, an ally, and adversary. He’d thought of her as some scorched fragment of a burning war, just as he was. But he could not for the life of him see her as a spy. Even as she sat and professed a history as horrid as any other agent’s, Alternis could only see wide eyes and white knuckles, tremors she made no effort to hide.

 _It’s because she left,_ he thought, suddenly. _She’s not an agent_ _anymore. She doesn’t_ have _to be._

“I don’t know where Tiz Arrior is,” said Agnès, snapping Alternis from his reverie. “But I know – and your Agent Lee could likely back this up – that Fiore DeRosa plays his cards close to his chest.”

Janne knit his eyebrows. “You’re saying Tiz has been under our noses this whole time?” he asked, letting his placid smile turn into something cutting and incredulous. Agnès only shrugged, and Alternis took his friend by the shoulder.

“We can’t afford to think otherwise,” he chided Janne. “Come on – let’s CoveOps ’til we drop.”

“I’m still not sure I credit it.”

Edea’s voice rang like a bell as it bounced off the curved sewer walls, but the echo to crowd back in toward them was ghostly, frosting her words with a minor key. Alternis tried for some noise of assent, but it was of little use. While Edea called out loud and clear, his own voice was weak with fatigue, and the rushing water at their feet swallowed it up with a haste Florem sewers did little else.

“‘Credit’ what?” Alternis finally managed. The sharp creases of the map had begun to wilt in his hands, and he gave it a little shake, as though he could dispel the sogginess blurring its pixellated lines. “Is this still about the Pope?”

“Not per se. I mean, I know what I think of _her_.” Edea held their torch, and she swung it around as she pulled a face, letting its cool glow turn her grimace into something fresh from a horror movie. “Like, sure, you’re being blackmailed – but you’re still an accessory, after the fact. And when I say ‘accessory,’ I’m _not_ talking Gucci handbag.” Her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes, and when Alternis spun to face her, he watched her sway uneasily in her galoshes. “It’s the _plan_ ,” she finally sighed. “What if this is just yet another wild goose chase, and Tiz isn’t at Gramercy Park? Or worse, what if Agnès decided she’d triple-cross us, and she’s rung ahead to warn the Legion we’re coming? I . . . you were _kidnapped_ , Alternis.” She set the torch back at her belt, letting its beam of light spray the water a toxic emerald, as she moved toward him. Her hands were cold against his cheeks, but Alternis leaned into her touch, pressing his forehead to hers. They were still for a long moment before Edea spoke again, pulling away to set back down the walkway at a brisk clip.

“You could have died – and frankly, you still _look_ half-dead,” she called, concern harshened by grit teeth. “I just . . . I don’t want you getting hurt. Not again.”

“Oh, Edea.” The words tumbled from his lips on soap-opera instinct, but Alternis found anything beyond that died in his throat. Instead, he folded the map against his chest as he moved to take her hand, ignoring the stickiness of wet Neoprene on clammy skin (Edea had vocally opted against gloves). “We’re in the home stretch,” he told her. “We’re going to make it through this mission.”

She didn’t answer.

This sector of the city had been standing since before the Civil War, and as such, Alternis knew that below the tarmac, it was a maze of tunnels and footpaths, an intricate tangle of walkways for the city’s lower classes to do the one-percent’s bidding unseen. It had been his idea to cut through the sewers. Every Floremian grew up on stories of the subway’s mole people, and of the Shadow City beneath their streets – and there came a time in every Floremian’s life when they found out those tall tales held a kernel of truth. Though the water was too toxic and the air too stagnant to host any life for long – much less anthropomorphic moles or teenage turtles, however mutant – it was not to say that the jungle beneath the city streets was impregnable. Indeed, the maintenance door at Bowery Station had come not only complete with a trapdoor into a cellar room, but a map of the water mains of the area. Fifteen minutes later, the dank concrete tunnels had expanded into tiled, if dingy, halls, and the walkways along the sewer proper were raised nearly high enough for Alternis and Edea to avoid the wastewater itself.

Nearly.

Hygienic or not, though, Alternis knew neither of them could complain. The walk from the central station to Gramercy would take an hour aboveground, four times the time their sewer trek did, even accounting for their detour down to the Bowery. Better yet, it meant avoiding the security cameras nested around Gramercy’s immaculate streets. Yew had boasted it would only have taken him half an hour to take out the traffic surveillance put up by the local police – but what then? The rich were paranoid, and the rich and powerful more paranoid still. Even if they hadn’t been encroaching on the Bloodrose Legion’s Florem base, Alternis knew that the safest way to stay in the black was to, well, quite _literally_ stay in the black.

“This it?”

When Edea spoke once more, her voice was dry: drier than anything had been for the past kilometre, at any rate. Alternis’ galoshes _“squelch”_ ed as he pried them from the muck lining the walkway.

“It must be,” he said, taking one last look at his map. He’d long since outgrown the need for its printed details – rather, he’d made a fold for every block he estimated they walked past. They’d either made it up Third Avenue, or they were about to drown in the East River. (Suddenly, the water’s rapid current at their feet seemed all the more sinister.) Nevertheless, he peeled the collar of his rash guard from the bulletproof vest he wore beneath, wedging the map under its reinforced seams. They’d done their best to suit up before their trek through the sewers, but Alternis was glad to be rid of the brightly coloured surf gear. Then he took the torch as Edea offered it, and swung it upward. Sure enough, the edges of the old clay pipe had crumbled to dust against their hold on the rocky ceiling, and jagged edges formed an awkward square around the drain cover.

There were rusty rungs set haphazardly into the wall, but Edea gave up on them quickly. Instead, Alternis watched her jam her feet against cracks in the brickwork, and loop her left elbow around a ladder rung as she moved for the door with her right. She cursed softly as she shoved a length of wire blindly through the crack between the door and the ceiling, and again when the wire fell from her waxy fingers. Though the chill seemed to dampen him to the bone, Alternis could understand why she’d opted against gloves: picking locks, _from behind_ , was hard enough without them.

Still, Edea was deft, and the trap door swung inward within the minute – just as she tumbled to the concrete below, the swinging slab of stone missing her by a hair. “Crystals!”she hissed, prying herself from the wastewater. “Who designs a trapdoor that opens _inward_?”

Alternis hardly dared to shrug, kneeling down to help her up. “People who don’t intend for it to be used as an entrance,” he told her. “Come on. Time’s a’wasting.”

Though he tried to sound commanding, Edea was the one to boost him through the new hole in the ceiling, linking her fingers to form a platform for his feet. Alternis almost felt like a child again, building human pyramids to reach the cookie tin (inevitably filled with sewing supplies) or the remote to the television set – but he knew there was no great prize awaiting their efforts this time; nor could he laugh when Edea’s grip slipped below him, leaving him to wriggle across the lip of the doorway himself.

“Sorry!” she called. This time, Alternis did shrug, wheeling himself around on the cold stone floor so she could see the gesture from the sewer.

“You coming?”

The room above the sewers was what one may have expected from a Florem townhouse’s basement: all weeping plaster stretched thin over bare brick, the concrete floor as cracked as desert soil, if only leaking _“water”_ in all the places Harena hadn’t. As Alternis peeled off the last of the waterproofs, and Edea did the same beside him, their damp fabric _“thwap”_ ed weakly against the puddles lining the floor – though the echo carried through the hall. Alternis could hardly help but clap his hands over his ears, shoulders shooting up at the sound.

“Easy, there,” said Edea, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Concrete is just about the most soundproof thing you can build a house out of – and I would know. I went undercover as the _bassist_ for the first daughter’s garage _grunge band_ for two months when we were sixteen.” She smiled gently. “Nobody heard that then, and nobody heard us now. Nobody knows we’re here.”

“I’d kiss you if we had the time.” Alternis spoke without thinking, and he watched Edea duck her head low, as though to hide a smile behind her hair – which was plaited neatly under a balaclava. But when she straightened, her gaze was cold.

“Yeah, well,” she said softly. “We don’t.”

Concrete or no, Alternis was relieved all the same that his footsteps were silent as he padded across the room, and he pressed his hand to the crack between the wall and the door as he edged the doorknob down. The shadows shrouding the staircase ahead moved like seaweed did, in a slow current: they eddied back and forth, not quite alive; the eyes of forgotten portraits may not have been _staring_ him down as he walked, but Alternis feared that they were still _watching_.

Though they’d strayed, now, from the safety of the basement, Alternis found himself clearing his throat: the silence to press over them was not the comforting one an agent could come to cherish. “So,” he began, scrabbling for some whispered thread of conversation. “Where’d you keep Tiz? In a house like this?”

Edea might have risen to the bait, but she did not bite. “I _wouldn’t_ keep him in a house like this,” she shot back. “Keep a clandestine hostage in my highly public, million-pound clubhouse? No thanks. I’d stash the poor critter somewhere secret. Like . . . oh, I don’t know, my . . . my sex dungeon.”

“You have a‘ _sex dungeon_?’”

“Aw, you wish, Chameleon.”

There had been a smile tugging at Alternis’ lips, but it faded quickly. _“Chameleon,”_ she’d said – and though Edea spoke the word with affection, Alternis was still hard-pressed to hear it as anything but a grim reminder. They were on the job, now.

“We’ve cleared above-ground, Medusa,” he whispered back. “Comms on.”

 _“Daedalus”_ and the _“Lobo”_ buzzed as soon as the signal was strong enough, and excepting a joke about their McDonald’s booth being a _“real classy_ shit _-uation room”_ (on Janne’s part, of course) they were as terse as Edea was. As Alternis was, himself. It seemed that the walls themselves stood straighter, the foundations of the townhouse stiffer; Florem had graduated from a city that never slept to one that could not sleep, or in any other way allow its focus to stray from the creeping footsteps of their Gramercy Park raid. The only thing not to back away had been the weather. Snow pounded relentlessly at bodegas and newsstands, and even below-ground, the inner-city sewers raced to accommodate the blizzard rushing through the rusted storm drains. Alternis could only hope that in time, the night would get the message that it wasn’t the time. An old house like the Players’ was one he knew promised to get a little funny in the storm: motion sensors outside grew erratic, and wooden beams would swell with humidity.

 _“Cre-e-eak.”_ Beneath his feet, the floorboards seemed to whisper in agreement – and it prompted Alternis to whisper, himself. “Chameleon to mission control,” he hissed into his mic, wary of the hush he threatened. “Do we have your clearance to go up?”

It was the only way _to_ go. With Edea at his heels, wielding the torch in one hand and her pistol in the other, they’d made it into the main parlour: the one advertised on the Players’ website, all old marquees and a charming stage. Alternis wondered, briefly, how many people would hear it if he burst onto those worn boards to give some impromptu performance – whether it be opera or slam poetry cursing DeRosa’s name, he was sure that there was a lot to say. But while the hour meant that the bottom floors were as barren as the winter had left Florem’s Central Park, Alternis was not so naïve as to think the house was empty. They’d simply not hit the paydirt yet.

 _“Check in at every floor”_ was Janne’s curt reply. Having ditched cam-contacts and GPS trackers, word of mouth was the only indicator Janne and Yew would have as to the field agents’ location. _Can’t risk Heinkel tracking us,_ Alternis reminded himself, though the thought was of little comfort. There was a part of him that feared Heinkel would know full well where they were. A four-man team was a lot of things – discreet, flexible, and easy to pass off as an innocuous group of grad students, to name a few – but with only so many agents to go around, they were also doomed to be woefully predictable.

“Keep up back there, Chameleon.” Edea had inched ahead of him, and the skin between her freckles was a chalky white in the narrow beam of the torchlight. She swung it around deftly, never letting it linger on a dusty corner or an overturned chair. “No security cameras,” she mused, once they’d swept the room for hiding spots and secret entrances. “Isn’t this place a tourist attraction?”

“The tours are all conducted by members,” Alternis recalled, “and even then, they only get access to the first two floors. It’s still a social club, after all.” He paused, letting himself sink against a stack of parlour tables. He’d not come to the raid with a pistol – instead, he’d thought himself armed with any local’s (or _Gossip Girl_ fan’s) passing knowledge of Florem’s elite. But when Alternis imagined a torch of his own dancing across the shadowy alcoves of his mind, the odd memory took solid shape: Crystmas carolling at the city’s finer temples, being paraded in front of trust-funded family reunions by impassive foster parents . . . and his opera teacher mentioning, in passing, the Players’ star-studded history.

 _“Even Sarah Bernhardt had a room there,”_ Mr. Pellar had once remarked, _“though_ that _was just what they’d nicknamed the elevator. Women, even honorary members, weren’t allowed to live on premises. Not back in her day.”_

“It’s the twenty-eighth today, isn’t it?” Alternis asked Edea. “Eighteen days since Tiz was kidnapped.”

“Don’t remind me,” she began, but Alternis pressed on:

“What’s the longest you were ever detained by an enemy agent?”

Edea rolled her lips, searching for an answer. “Forty-eight hours,” she finally announced. “Why? DeRosa had _you_ a week—”

“—and even starved and dehydrated, I managed to get myself out.” The cold air of the parlour might have been still, with the windows painted shut and all the doors locked tight, but still, it needled at Alternis’ face as his eyes grew wide, and his lips parted, ever so slightly. “We’re used to thinking of hostage situations as metal chairs and torture. But nobody can keep that up for long.”

“You’re right! If their mission is to keep him long-term, Tiz would have to be drugged,” Edea pointed out. A tentative smile was playing at her lips, eyebrows arched. “And if that was the case, they’d have to keep him somewhere he couldn’t hurt himself.”

“Exactly.” Alternis had to let himself grin, if only to match hers. “The bedrooms are on the top floor.”

But as a burst of static crackled along his comms wire – and the static caused him to miss a step of the winding staircase, twisting his ankle against the edge of the next stair up – Alternis felt that grin go slack. “Janne?”he asked, forgoing formality. “What are you . . . why—”

“Everything all right, Chameleon?” Edea twisted to look back at him, eyes icy in the light of her torch. “Who are you talking to? I’ve not got anything coming in on _my_ comms . . . ”

Though they’d crawled from the sewers to a house straining under the winter storm, Alternis’ mouth was dry, his tongue as scratchy as sand. Mission control wasn’t supposed to contact field agents outside of routine check-ins – and they definitely weren’t supposed to divide and conquer.

“Maybe your signal’s weak,” Alternis said. Alternis _lied._ The smile he turned on Edea was one he hoped she couldn’t see: she knew him well enough to spot the fakes.

But Edea turned away all the same, and the air was filled with the sound of rustling fabric as she fumbled with the wire to her earpiece, hidden under hood and cap. “Well?” he prompted, into his own comms. His lips were pressed thin, and his voice all but imperceptible, at the back of his throat. Alternis knew he hadn’t taken that ventriloquism course for nothing.

 _“It’s nice that you don’t want her to feel left out, Chameleon.”_ Janne’s voice was lighthearted in a way that meant he felt anything but – and the next to come over the line was as dark and grumbling as a thundercloud,

 _“We don’t have time for pleasantries,”_ said the Marshal. _“Nor foreign agents.”_

“What in the world?” Alternis bounded down the stairs two at a time, not caring as Edea called for him at the next landing up. It wasn’t until the stiff chill of the parlour whipped against his chest that Alternis spoke once more (this time, letting himself move his mouth). “Heinkel might have been a mole, Marshal, but Medusa is clean—”

_“And this is a mission that does not concern her, boy.”_

_“Boy.”_ No Chameleon, no Alternis, no _“son.”_ Alternis swallowed hard, resisting the urge to rip the earpiece from under his hood as the sound leapt once more. The Marshal must have been clearing his throat, or clapping his hands – any one of a number of great booming gestures.

_“The Lobo has filled me in on the situation regarding the Pope. I understand you and Edea are on the ground at Her Excellency’s suggestion, in an attempt to extract Tiz Arrior. And I also understand that the file being used to blackmail her is presumed to be at this same Ground Zero.”_

_No,_ thought Alternis. _No, don’t make me do this._

 _“Yes, Marshal. That is correct.”_ Janne must have been smiling for his life, and his voice came out at a whinge through teeth Alternis could only assume he was grinding.

 _“Lobo, instruct Edea – er,_ Medusa _– to go ahead and search for Tiz Arrior. Tell her that the Chameleon will join her shortly, and that he’s doing recon . . . oh, wherever.”_ Alternis imagined the Marshal leaning back in his chair, running massive hands through the too-sharp angles of his beard. _“_ Divide et impera _,”_ said the Marshal softly, his voice like wind over gravel as it crackled through the comms. _“Chameleon, whether or not you leave Gramercy Park with Tiz Arrior, it is imperative you find Pope Oblige’s file.”_

“And destroy it?” asked Alternis, hopefully. But he already knew the answer.

Even before the day he’d shot Eloch Quentis Khamer, Alternis had never liked carrying weapons. When he’d first landed in Harena, Alternis had felt as though the only thing to burn worse than the desert sun was the bayonet strapped to his hip, and the tear gas he’d been issued never felt fully contained within its canister as his throat would grow dry and constricted with every plodding step. Worst of all had been the way his hands stung as he closed them around those awful assault rifles: the way the sunbaked gunmetal had made him so crucially aware of every cut to ever line his palms, and how every jump of recoil had brought him that much closer to a heart attack.

That was rather the way he felt now. There was only one pocket sewn to his vest, and in its depths, a thumb drive rested right against his heart; it threatened to bore right between his ribs with his every step. The Marshal had informed him that he’d boarded a late-night train east to Florem, and Alternis knew that no matter what, in a few hours’ time, he’d be pressing that tiny, vexing stick into the expanse of the Marshal’s scarred palm.

 _“It’s a safety precaution, Chameleon,”_ the Marshal had said. But the Agency had never been famed for _“precaution:”_ they were known for staging coups in South Luxendarc and cherry-picking assassination targets to drive oil-drenched countries into civil war.

And Alternis was going to give them the Pope.

 _Not “them,”_ he thought, as he stumbled from the stairwell to a rich carpet. _It’s “us.” I’m CIA, too._

“What took you?”

Edea had balled her ski cap up at her side, and though her hair tumbled down the front of her bulletproof vest in easy-breezy blonde waves, her knuckles were white around the balaclava’s black wool. “Well?” she prompted him, as he drew nearer. “What did the Marshal want?”

Alternis’ lungs were burning, as well, his breaths a little shallower with every step he stretched across the stairs. This, he told himself, was why he sank to the floor in front of Edea’s feet, eyes wide as he lifted his chin to face her. “We didn’t do a very good job of hiding that, did we?”

“No.” Edea rolled her lips, before reaching her hand down to Alternis. He took it as she helped him back up, and held it in both of his as he met her gaze. It was as much for his own benefit as it was a signal to her, and Alternis’ system flooded with relief when she did not pull away. “Then,” she was saying, “he never was a subtle man.”

“Are you ever going to tell me how you know him?”Alternis asked. He knew the world of secret intelligence was a small one – but he also knew that no agent-officer interaction had ever cut him quite so deeply as the emotions warring in Edea’s icy eyes indicated the Marshal had her. But now, her eyes were narrow and unreadable; with freckles dotting her skin and her stare reduced to two small slashes in her face, those eyes might very well have been sketched afterthoughts on some pale marble statue.

“I’ll tell you about me and the Marshal if you tell me about _you_ and the Marshal,” said Edea, at last. “More specifically, if you tell me what little errand was so important to him that he had us break up the mission.”

The thumb drive might have raised hellfire against his chest, but Alternis had never felt colder than when Edea let go of his hand.

“I . . . I care about you, Alternis.” Edea’s frown was wry, and it barely twitched as Alternis scrambled to echo her words. “But I need to know I can trust you. I need to know that it’s the _two_ of us against . . . well, you know. Against the world.”

“It is,” he promised her. “Of course it is.” His throat was still bone-dry, and Alternis could feel the scrapes had left against its walls long after they’d been spoken. All he could think to do was reach for Edea’s hand again, pressing her palm to his chest: to the hard planes right above the ragged beating of his heart, above that tight-zipped pocket. “But right now, it’s the two of us against the Bloodrose Legion. Did you, um . . . ”

 _Did you find Tiz?_ he’d wanted to ask, but the thought came as just one gust of wind in a whirling cyclone. It had been so long since Tiz had even been their primary focus – and Alternis could hardly help but feel it was typical for the poor man, so inconspicuous, so magnetic for entropic upheaval, to be stuck as the pin to the grenade of DeRosa’s ambitions for world domination. Now, in the dim torchlight stretching across the hallway, Alternis felt the glassy silver of his thoughts darken to charcoal and gunmetal; that storm of images and memories had all come to focus on Tiz, and the way his disappearance had not only gone unnoticed by the world at large – but been specifically covered up by the Crystal Orthodoxy itself.

All Edea did was nod. “I think so,” she said. “There was only one door I could _tell_ was locked. I could barely see under the door without giving myself away, but I could tell the carpet was crooked, and the dust wasn’t quite so heavy. If Tiz is anywhere in this building, it’ll be in there.”

Alternis’ pulse still hadn’t quite stayed, and for the miles they’d trekked through the most polluted sewers this side of the ocean, Alternis had never wished to be back on the water: at the edge of a current that could push him forward as well as pull him back, that meant he did not have to take agency over his own actions. But as it was, Alternis’ mind had come alive with a chorus of _Left, right, left,_ and his arms hung like lead pipes as he dogged at Edea’s heels.

The staircases to the Players’ Club might well have been tourist attractions in and of themselves, all gilded railings and polished oak as they led Florem’s best and brightest past scores of oil portraits and photographs of themselves. But for every muted bustle gown or impeccable cravat scrawled across those canvases, Alternis could only see face after face leering down at him. Edea had given him the torch, in order to keep both hands on her pistol, and in its light, Alternis felt as though he were forcing every theatre kid’s greatest dream into an overexposed nightmare, his stomach churning as he stared down Mark Twain and Liza Minelli . . .

. . . and as he took in the roses splashed across their portraits’ matching backdrops. They seemed to be everywhere: even if the model of a portrait was not wearing one on their person, the painting inevitably featured one beside the subject on the table or hanging, dried, on the wall. Every picture on the wall had an ornate golden frame more crowded with the damned flowers than the Queen of Eisenberg’s gardens, and even the wallpaper was dotted with red blooms.

Not for the first time, Alternis marvelled at just how gauche the actors of the Club could be. It made sense they would host the Bloodrose Legion as well: there was no accounting for taste.

The fourth and final floor of Sixteen Gramercy Park South was more sparsely decorated than its fellows closer to street level (for which Alternis, head swimming with roses, could only be glad). The carpet running along the corridor was threadbare, and the lamps set in the walls were encased in simple sconces, rather than the ornate copper frames of the parlour’s spotlights. Occasionally, they would pad past a door left slightly ajar against a prim nineteenth-century room, desks and dressers askew to suggest that once upon a time, someone had lived there.

“It’s this one,” said Edea, at last. She jut her chin toward a door near the end of the hall. “Are you ready?”

The last time Alternis had been _“ready”_ for anything, he’d been boarding the Marshal’s chartered Cessna off the tarmac of Camp Shorabak, never to see Harenan soil (well, sand) again. But he could only nod.

“On three,” he told Edea, as she levelled her pistol with the lock on the doorknob. “Three!”

 _“Blam!”_ Even with a silencer fitted to its muzzle, the gunshot shook the floorboards, and Alternis felt his knees knock together as she kicked the door open. But there was no time for panic – and nor was there room. Every inch of the bedroom was swathed in heavy cloth, the kind one put down before painting, and in the torchlight, the air was filled with eddies of dust. Most striking, though, were the books: stacked around the narrow bed like spindly Classic columns, pinning down those cloths, and piled high against the (locked) window, it seemed the entirety of the Florem public library had found a holiday home in Tiz Arrior’s makeshift cell.

“Crystals,” breathed Edea. “Look.”

Alternis could scarcely see Tiz, for the shadows shrouding him. Sure enough, though, there he was. And even with salt-and-pepper hair wild against the pillow and skin as white as the sheets strewn around him, there was no mistaking that placid face, or those knobbly limbs. Alternis had only met him the once, but between the events of the mission and its heady weight, he felt as though Tiz had been their mark his whole life.

“Gently, now,” he was telling Edea. “We don’t know what he’s expecting.” He’d cupped his hands over the torch’s bulb to dull its glow, and his steps were as small and neat as a mouse’s as he crept toward the bed. Edea nodded, and Alternis could hear her breath catch in her throat as she made to whisper:

“Tiz, wake—”

“I thought I heard noises.”

Alternis could hear the bones in his neck _“cre-ea-eak”_ as loudly as the floorboards beneath him as he whipped around, joints clicking just as Edea’s pistol did as she cocked it, behind him. But Fiore DeRosa only smiled, black eyes glittering like beetle carapaces in the dark.

“You know,” he was musing, “I thought I was hearing _rats_. And I guess I sort of was.” His grin stretched, ever so slightly. “Now, I don’t suppose you two are here for a nightcap?”

“Go to hell, Fiore.” Edea shoved past Alternis, pistol drawn, but DeRosa was unfazed.

“Don’t shoot, dearest Edea.” Quick as a viper, he lunged for the bed, and scooped a still-sleeping Tiz up in front of him like a shield. Only when Tiz’s head lolled forward could Alternis see DeRosa’s face had settled into a glare, the muscles of his face taut and alive. “After all, that’s how people get shot.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry this chapter came late, i was working on my naruto surfing au (and waiting on its well-deserved nobel literature prize)


	10. Live and Let Spy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> warning: chapter's a bit violent, reader discretion advised.

_“Private Dim—_ Alternis _. Alternis, you don’t have to do this.”_

_Alternis was silent: it was all he knew to be. But the dry air was filled with an insistent rattling where the raw-bitten nails on his shaking fingers bumped against the metal of his gun, and though he could not hear them, Alternis knew the night was going to be coming to life with sirens against the rubble of that settlement. Even behind him, he could hear the way shallow breaths fluttered against sandy Kevlar as the Marines left of their mission fell into silent rank, accepting their Sergeant’s disappearance as an inevitable before Alternis pulled the trigger. In short, the silence only existed for Alternis himself – and that made it all more the oppressive._

_“Alternis,_ please _. I have a wife. Children.”_

And you killed countless other wives, Khamer. Countless other children. _Alternis might have snapped back, if he’d known how. But the words had died in his throat when he’d first knocked Sergeant Eloch Quentis Khamer to the ground, and now all he could do was shake._

_Well, that wasn’t quite right. It was not_ “all” _he could do. Because Alternis could have slid his handgun back into his belt, turned tail, and gone missing in action himself. He might even had plead for forgiveness. He might have made it out of Harena both free and alive._

_But as Khamer spread his hands, beady eyes wide as they could go, Alternis knew he wasn’t_ going _to. When his fist closed around one of Khamer’s trunklike arms, it was the first time Alternis noted that his hands were not shaking; his tread was stiff as he forced Khamer to his knees._

_“Please don’t shoot.”_

_Even now, a boot on his neck and his head to the ground, Khamer begged for his life. Alternis wondered if the civilians had been begging, too._

_He pulled the trigger._

_The silence to follow was all-encompassing. True._

“Don’t shoot . . . ”

For words Alternis had heard so many times, he’d never heard them quite like this. DeRosa’s eyes were dark, to be sure, but they were narrowed to slits under eyebrows twitching in silent laughter, and his voice was steady and satin-smooth as he taunted them. “After all, that’s how people get shot.”

Alternis didn’t notice his hands until he could see them: he couldn’t feel his motions, and they didn’t register in his mind as anything more than blurs of the shadows quilting the room. Sure enough, though, trembling fingers had formed an ashen frame around what little he could see; Alternis had spread his hands, though he and Edea were the ones staring DeRosa down.

“Alternis, get behind me.” Edea wasted no time on codenames, and when she turned, ever so briefly, to meet his gaze, Alternis saw her jaw was set. Still, even with that deadly frown and those blazing eyes, Alternis couldn’t help but think of her, now, as brittle: all pale features and quick angles, in that patented, superspy stance, she might very well have been made of glass.

DeRosa’s voice didn’t exactly come as a surprise – indeed, Alternis rather expected he’d have something to say – but it sent a jolt down Alternis’ spine all the same. His voice wasn’t quite cold: rather, it reminded Alternis of dish soap – lazy and smooth, but sticky when left unchecked. And so Alternis found himself ready to spit as DeRosa turned a disarming smile on the two of them.

“It wasn’t so long ago you would have been saying that to _me_ , Edea,” he was cooing . . . if not to her. Alternis bristled as DeRosa’s blank stare met his, the planes of his face warping as they folded into a smile. “Did little Alternis know about us, I wonder?”

“I’ll kill you.” Coming from Edea, it was a promise – but DeRosa wasn’t looking. He didn’t have to try to get Edea to rise to the bait, but Alternis was another challenge: a puzzle that even a week of starvation and intermittent bullying hadn’t let him crack. Alternis swallowed hard, imagining the realisation coating his constricting throat like Pepto-Bismol as he met DeRosa’s glare.

“‘Little Alternis’ knows a lot of things,” he boasted instead. Then, because it felt a bit lacking, he added, “You dirtbag.”

“Ooh, ‘dirtbag.’ Edea, you didn’t mention he was such a wit.”

_I’d show you_ “wit,” _Jack and the Giant Jack-Off, if I thought you and the three brain cells you’ve spent on all these brilliant kidnapping schemes could comprehend it._ Alternis could only thin his lips. DeRosa had looped his arms around Tiz’s slumped midsection, pasty knuckles white even in the darkness as he gripped at his captive’s chest. In his grasp, Tiz looked like a rag doll; even his ankles had rolled in, feet dragging without any weight driven through them. Ordinarily, he might have suspected some heavy anaesthesia – what else could knock a man out so thoroughly? – but there were no syringes littering the labyrinth of books.

And Crystals, were there a lot of books. Alternis’ thoughts hadn’t exactly stopped whirling since the night of the Yulyana gala, three weeks prior, but they were racing at a fever pitch, now, and his heart hammered against that damned thumb drive pressed against it. The countless tomes weren’t just any old overdue library selections: they were all bound in leathers and rich cottons, and embossed with faded gold icons. They were religious texts. DeRosa must have spent his nights reading to poor Tiz, if and when he stirred for long enough from his drug-induced stupor to even hear the word _“Crystals”_ spill from his captor’s thin lips.

The sheets, everywhere. DeRosa wouldn’t have wanted Tiz, if he’d managed to pry himself from that bed, to stumble into a shelf or an armoire – but what was more, he wouldn’t have wanted Tiz to know where he was. With all that heavy canvas boxing them in, the room could have had two square feet or twenty, been a cramped corner alcove or a winding atrium: all that was left, when those glassy eyes opened, was an endless expanse of white, and so many Crystalist preachings. DeRosa, it seemed, would never tire of trying to break people down.

Alternis could only hope it had been his first mistake.

He didn’t dare look to Edea, fearing DeRosa would notice the gesture. Instead, he nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to skirt around her, and lunged: forcing Tiz’s lolling head down with one hand and forcing the other into DeRosa’s jaw. His hips groaned in protest, but he brought his leg high all the same, bringing his foot slamming down on the crook of DeRosa’s elbow. It was the only way he could think of to break DeRosa’s grasp; indeed, DeRosa buckled, falling to one knee, and Alternis was quick to edge between them, fixing his own hands around the clammy skin of Tiz’s neck.

_“Little Alternis knows a lot of things,”_ he’d lied. But he spoke with certainty all the same.

“He’s on oral barbiturates, right, DeRosa?” he wanted to know. “ _Nice_ move. Those are, like, Baby’s First Sedatives. But I’m sure you knew that . . . ”

A flicker of guilt brushed at his throat, but Alternis took a deep breath, willing it to expel. _It’s just for show,_ he told himself, and closed his hands just that much tighter around Tiz’s throat.

“ . . . as I’m sure you knew,” he went on, voice whisper-soft, “that if you’ve given Tiz enough of the over-the-counter stuff, like Amytal, to knock him out, you’re risking some serious side effects.” He paused, flashing a gifted-kid smile he hadn’t earned and didn’t mean. “‘Barbs’ are muscle relaxants, you know. And overdoses make your breathing real shallow. So shallow, in fact—” and there, the smile slipped just as quickly as Alternis had mustered it up “—that Tiz’ll be dead within three minutes if I don’t let go of his throat.”

Edea caught his gaze, briefly, and Alternis could see how her frown waxed and waned with the emotions in her eyes: balking surprise and rapid-blinking acceptance, tumbling too quickly after one another. For a moment, that doubt was back, sparking like a static shock against the careful circuitry of gall Alternis hadn’t known he’d had. But then Edea set her face, and lifted her gun.

“Two minutes,” she told DeRosa, levelling at his head.

Tiz’s breaths had begun creeping forward in pace, and Alternis could feel the way his windpipe trembled against his palms. Wordlessly, he slid his arm forward, letting Tiz’s neck fall into the lock of his elbow (clad in layers of Kevlar) instead.

It was just a more practical chokehold.

DeRosa’s laugh shook the weathered floorboards; Alternis could feel it even through the soles of his boots, and through the discarded canvas sheet stretching like the East River did between his side of the room and theirs: between him and Edea.

“Good show, you two,” DeRosa was cackling, wrapping his arms around his sides. “Oh, Edea, you always did have a flair for the dramatic. And Alternis! I should have known an inner-city kid would know his drugs—”

_“Thwack!”_

Edea, eyes wide and lips thin, was still far from nonplussed, but she managed a weak smile as she turned to Alternis – and as DeRosa, a welt rising on his forehead where the butt of her pistol had struck him, crumpled to the floor. “Sorry,” she said, “I should’ve done that sooner.”

“No time like the present, I suppose,” said Alternis, but Edea was already moving: scooping a still-unconscious Tiz into a fireman’s carry and kicking the door back open.

“Come on,” she was hissing, “let’s _go_!”

Alternis longed to protest. It felt to him as though they’d left too much unsaid: that the silence to rise with so much dust from the canvas covering the floor was yawning and expectant, and that fleeing the scene of what might have been a crime wouldn’t settle anything he might have ripped up.

But slung across Edea’s shoulders, Tiz was stiller than ever – making it all the more jarring as DeRosa’s unconscious form began to twitch on the floor where they’d left him. So Alternis ran.

“I wasn’t really gonna kill him.”

By the time they’d edged back down to the parlour, Alternis felt he couldn’t let the sentiment hang any longer. It sounded even weaker out loud than it had felt – words he’d imagined to sound petulant had come out house-mouse meek and just as squeaky – but he said them all the same: repeating himself for good measure. “I just wanted to scare DeRosa,” Alternis insisted. “I wasn’t going to kill him.”

Edea was still hovering on the last step of the stairwell, hands tiny white vices where they clutched at Tiz’s dangling limbs. “I know,” she said. It was all she said, and Alternis’ stomach lurched. He’d been twisting his tongue into the roof of his mouth in attempts to keep it clammed shut, but now, he wanted to bite it off.

“Edea, listen to me,” he pleaded, moving for the stairwell. “It was—”

“Alternis!” Her eyes were blazing. “I said I _know_ , all right?”

When she sighed, the whole-body movement – the rise and fall of her shoulders, the way she let her chin drop as she deflated, ever so slightly – nearly tipped Tiz onto the hardwood floors below; Edea let his head press against the wall as she brought a hand to her own. “Alternis, please, I know,” she said, once more. “You don’t need to defend yourself. We’ve all said and done some wretched things these past few weeks, but . . . ”

Alternis couldn’t be sure if it was the chill or something deeper that needled tears from his eyes, but there was no denying that his vision was watery, the marquees and photos ahead of him blurry as he blinked, blinked, blinked.

“We make a living off promises we never mean to keep,” Edea finally managed, wresting Tiz back onto her shoulders. “I trust you, Alternis. But now isn’t the time.”

_“I trust you.”_ How many days had it been since she’d accused him of sabotaging the mission and wasting everyone’s time by being kidnapped? Or since she’d insisted he pushed martyrdom to such hamartia she felt the need to measure him against a play that predated women’s suffrage? How long had it been since she’d kissed him – and he’d kissed her – and they’d insisted all the walls would come down for the sake of the other? Alternis was happy to follow Edea’s whirlwind emotions, wherever they took her – but now, he could hardly help but feel he’d been left in uncharted waters; her eyes were as blank as glaciers and ever as cold. _“I trust you.”_ Did she really?

Should she have?

Any doubts he’d left on the subject were dashed by an echo from above them: stumbling and cursing just dull enough to be indecipherable – but not so foreign that Alternis couldn’t be dead certain who it was; that he couldn’t picture DeRosa clutching at that l’Oréal-red hair and stalking like down the stairs as though they were the savanna to his swaggering lion (a lion that was recently unemployed, or otherwise just generally jilted). What brief reprieve they’d been allowed was up.

Alternis turned so quickly back to Edea he heard his ankles pop in protest. “Edea,” he said, “you have to get Tiz out of here.”

“I’m not leaving you,” she snapped, “not with him.”

But she was already hoisting Tiz higher on her shoulders, angling for the maintenance doors through which they’d first come. With Tiz safe in her hold – and the thumb drive safe in his – Alternis knew there was no time to waste. A mission was never as likely to fail as it was when it was nearly at a close: it was one of the few great universal constants, up there along with the certainty of the tides and the fires of the sun. And beyond that, Alternis knew Edea acted just as he did on deep-rooted instincts. If DeRosa was some great cat, prowling the grasslands, they were prey animals with a wounded pack member. Every shuffle, every slight gust of air seemed an unspoken cry; they seemed, then, to be begging Alternis to _“Run!”_

But instead he took one step back up the stairs. Then another, then another. “I can hold him off,” he told Edea. “Take Tiz down to the sewers, and up through the nearest manhole cover – there should be one right in front of the house, on 20th and Irving. You can hide out in the crowds once you get back to the city proper, and we’ll regroup to meet with Janne and Yew.”

“You wouldn’t find us,” began Edea, but she fell silent. If Alternis was in any shape to do so, he’d find them. That much, both of them could promise.

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, at last. She let Tiz’s arms fall to snake her hand to her belt. For a moment, Alternis wondered – and he couldn’t be sure if the outcome was one he hoped for or feared – if she was going to pass him her pistol. But instead she secured it tightly in its holster. DeRosa hadn’t been armed, but giving anyone a gun before going up in a fight against him only meant they risked allowing him to be. Giving _Alternis_ that gun would have made that risk a promise.

“Take care,” he told her. He longed to say more – but what? _“Don’t get killed?” “Don’t drop Tiz?” “We’ve been less than together for less than a day but I think I want to be at your side forever?”_

Before he could say anything at all, Edea was gone.

The main stairwell leading from the parlour was as grand an affair as anything might have been at number Sixteen, Gramercy Park South, and so Alternis decided that aside from the way it swallowed the sounds of footfalls, even the velvet carpeting the last few stairs wasn’t quite noteworthy – not anymore. What he did note was that the space between the stairs, running in opposite directions from the landing, was a tight fit: his knees knocked together and his shoulders shot up to his ears as Alternis peeled himself from over the banister of one staircase to position himself under the other. The balusters were ornate affairs in ornately carved teak (or some other wood that some rainforest sufferedsome horrible fate for) and leaned all the way back, spine dug into the plaster, Alternis was just tall enough to use them as supports where the sculpture jut out from under the spandrel flooring. It might have been unnecessary – their long shadows had turned the stairwells and the showy decorations dotting them into a mottled charcoal etching, all blurred contours and half-finished details – but Alternis did little by halves. If that meant hanging like a bat under the staircase as he waited for DeRosa to work his way downstairs, so be it.

When DeRosa did begin to move down the last flight of stairs to the main parlour of the Players’ Club, Alternis found himself caught halfway off his guard. DeRosa might not have been a legitimate agent, but he moved like one: his tread was feather-light, and he kept his centre of gravity in delicate suspension, shifting it with every measured step. All the same, as stealthy as he was – and his carriage truly was catlike, silent as the dead night around them – Alternis had been training for years against people who moved just like he did. It was rather the risk of running counterintelligence: nobody was better prepared to take out an agent than an enemy agent themselves.

Drawing in an empty stomach was an oddly specific sort of pain: Alternis imagined the awkward patchwork of wiry muscles and brittle bones folding in on itself as he tightened his core, inching as quietly as he could away from the wall he pressed against. He’d pressed his ankles around that florid baluster, fingers spread wide as he dug the heels of his palms into a wall that was just barely supporting him, but now, he began peeling away. Slowly but surely, Alternis worked his hands to the base of the stairwell above him, and, his every twitch agonising as the bones of his neck grated against the wall, he could flatten out, inching his grip on the baluster higher and higher until he was hanging by his knees.

Then . . . _“Fwap!”_

“Oof!”

Alternis may not have shared DeRosa’s grace, flinging himself from the ceiling to cling to his neck, but this was not to say his movements weren’t calculated. DeRosa had been edging his weight forward and backward, seesawing on the balls of his feet to keep from stumbling, and risk making a sound. So Alternis had hit him from the side: slamming all his weight through his arms, where he pushed them into the crook between DeRosa’s neck and shoulder, and bringing his knees in right afterward – driving one to DeRosa’s side, above his kidney, and the other to his solar plexus.

DeRosa went down hard, but he was not so shocked as to neglect bringing Alternis down with him. He locked one of Alternis’ legs in place with his own, and he managed to connect a punch to Alternis’ jaw before Alternis managed to force his head into the handrail behind them both. They were a tangle of limbs and muttered curses as they tumbled down the stairs.

“Should I be happy you stuck around, Alternis?”

Even after the blows he’d taken, DeRosa was the first to pop to his feet, and he was quick to draw his hands close to his chest, fists clenched. “I’m willing to overlook our past unpleasantness if you really are considering coming into the light of the Crystals,” he was going on, teeth flashing even in the gloom as he forced a teasing smile. “Forgiveness is a virtue, after all.”

“Shove it up your ass, DeRosa.” Alternis’ knuckles were white as he clawed at the banister, swaying as he stood. “That is, if there’s any room left, with your head wadded so far up there.”

“Genuine question: have you been saving that one since secondary school? It sounded rehearsed.”

Alternis could only glower – and dive.

It was what he knew: staying low to the ground, winding asplike through obstacles felt rather than seen, whether they be sniper rigs or fellow men. He was conditioned to use others’ gravity against them, and so when DeRosa lunged, missing his collar by a hair, Alternis rolled. DeRosa’s motions played out like the instructions on a dancing video game: Down! Up! Up! Kneecap, kneecap, groin! He might have been aching in muscles he’d half-forgotten he had, after Spidermanning across the ceiling, and his stomach might have been churning against a mind standing stock-still, but Alternis was still fast, and it had to count for something.

When he surfaced at last, he’d pulled DeRosa back into the parlour proper, where Edea had been standing just minutes before. The thought of her sent Alternis’ heart stumbling over a beat; a flash of not-quite-light in front of him didn’t register as DeRosa’s hands, but as a glimpse of Edea. Alternis could only hope she’d made it into the streets, by now. There was an artistry to losing oneself in a crowd – but Florem sold that craft as a paint-by-numbers guidebook. She’d be safe. Alternis knew the city, and he knew her. She’d be _safe_.

(And Tiz would, too, he supposed.)

“You’re looking starstruck, Dim.”

DeRosa had slung himself across an old wooden chair as though he hadn’t just been pushed down a flight of stairs and kicked several times in the core. In fact, his posture was languid as ever, his shoulders thrown back over a chest that managed to be proud even as he folded over himself. “Why could that be?” he was going on. “Finally have a coherent thought, did you?”

Alternis was quick to pry his hand from the parquetry of the floor, and jam it into the crook of his arm once he’d come to his feet. “DeRosa,” he breathed, “you’re more use to us alive than dead – but not _that_ much more use.”

“Going to kill me, are you?” DeRosa flung his arms wide, fingers spread in jazz hands. Even under cover of darkness, hung like so many cobwebs from old columns and the wings of that little stage, he seemed to sit with a spotlight over his head. And somehow, despite millennia of spies’ legacies bearing down on either of them, DeRosa didn’t make it seem like a target.

“Go ahead,” he went on. “Go on, do it. I know you can.” He was goading him, now, and he knew it: Alternis saw the way the room got a little darker around that megawatt smile so out of place on his thin lips. “Kill me, Alternis Dim.”

Alternis had seen a documentary, once, about volcanoes, and how they worked. How the earth beneath humanity’s feet was an ill-fitting Tupperware lid on so many miles of magma – rock so pressurised, so heated, it was molten; how the magma filled with bubbles under its own immense pressure, and rocketed upward and outward, the very earth unable to stop all that power from overflowing. He couldn’t be sure how much of any one person’s system was made of that magma – how many little grey men he passed each day, barely containing such roiling rage – but suddenly, he found himself all too aware of how even the hardest granite and heaviest gneiss gave way to pressure as it built inside.

“Kill me, Alternis. Like you killed . . . like Eloch Quentis Khamer.” Alternis had known that name was coming. He’d been prepared. He’d never stopped thinking of it. “Like Suleiman Barbarossa.”

_“Bang! Bang!”_ He’d fired so fast there’d scarcely been any light to remember it by: all Alternis could see as he squeezed his eyes shut were the blurry features of Edea’s face, half-buried beneath a stranger’s heel.

“Like Erutus Profiteur. Ciggma Khint.”

His first black-bag renditions. Alternis could scarcely remember their faces, even if the gaping wound’s he’d drawn into their flesh remained clear as the winter night, every shadow a reminder of dark bloodstains. “Like so many cadets set adrift after you put their Sergeant down.”

Sometimes, Alternis knew, volcanoes didn’t erupt. Sometimes, warring tectonic plates left deep scars in the earth, and the magma that wrested itself free from the mantle below only hardened into rock once more once it hit air that was all too ready to meet it. He’d wondered, the first time he’d seen that documentary – with Janne’s head in his lap and a Lego tower of discarded candy bars set in front of them – if that was preferable to the explosive alternative: if it was better to burn out or to fade away, if the outside world had mercy on all that melted rock.

Janne had just smushed another PayDay into his face, grumbling something about how rock was, well, _just rock_ : it didn’t care because it couldn’t. But Alternis felt now that anything was possible. Indeed, though DeRosa’s preening – his easy smiles and tossed hair – came in millisecond bursts through the darkness, Alternis felt as though he could feel each movement shaking through the floor below him, and the walls were just that much tighter when DeRosa spoke once more.

“Like you killed Einheria Venus.”

It was DeRosa’s turn to strike, and for all Alternis had fancied himself an asp, DeRosa moved like a viper: he was deadly quick and deadly sure, pressing relentlessly down. He rolled neatly from the chair in order to swing it across the floor, catching Alternis first by the shins, and then raking the legs of the chair across his fingertips as Alternis made to hit the floor. It was all he could do not to cry out – which proved to be a wise choice. Alternis’ tongue had already been halfway under his teeth when he’d first fallen to his knees, and as he swerved to avoid the tip of DeRosa’s shoe, barrelling toward his chin, Alternis knew he’d risked biting it off (a nasty way to go).

But even as he evaded one blow, there was another, and a followup hot on its heels. DeRosa must have anticipated he would get low, Alternis realised, too slowly, because he loomed over him, now, and he was making the most of it. Stomp! _“Thud!”_ DeRosa bore down on him heavier than the parlour’s halfhearted darkness ever could, and Alternis was scrambling, quite literally, to keep up.

“You left her to die, Alternis.” Alternis thought he’d grown used to the way DeRosa’s teasing smiles cut in all the same ways Edea’s did, but the grin he flashed down on him now was manic and cruel; the thought of Edea turning that malice on the world – or worse, having it turned on her – made Alternis feel sicker than anything DeRosa had yet to say . . .

. . . not that it meant DeRosa would back off. “No,” he was jeering, “worse than that, you abandoned your responsibilities and Einheria died in what was likely your _stead_. Do you think about that, Alternis? The semantics of it all?” DeRosa’s honeyed voice had grown gritty and hoarse with his laboured breaths, but he pressed doggedly onward. He punctuated each sentence with another strike toward Alternis’ face, open palms and tense fingers like so many daggers – or so many B-list kung fu movies. But the thought was of little solace: even if Alternis had the room to get up, he doubted he could have.

“You killed her all the same,” came DeRosa’s voice. “Einheria is dead because of—”

“ _Shut UP_!”

Tackling was rarely covered in the combat training of the US Marine Corps, nor was it a staple in the arsenals of the Agency. This was, perhaps, because blindly throwing oneself at a moving target was more than just ungainly: it was a stupid move more likely to harm the attacker than the attacked. But all the same, Alternis bowled forward, leading with his head like a bull as he stumbled into an expanse he supposed must have been DeRosa’s stomach. Gall, he found, was in desperately short supply; memories of drill sergeants’ cries and the Marshal’s grim disapproval ached worse than any of the blows he’d actually suffered as Alternis fought back years of training to kick and punch and scream, all fleeting fire as he pried DeRosa from his space.

And that was the key word: _“fleeting.”_ For while Alternis’ blood pounded like the tide (if only less dependent on the whims of the moon) there was nothing of the ocean’s ferocity in his movements. Even as he lashed out, again and again, he had about as much bearing as the break of the shore might have against some seaside cliff: DeRosa’s words had finally hit the rock bottom Alternis had forgotten he’d had, and he was hollow as he pressed forward. _Einheria’s not dead,_ he thought, desperately. _She’s missing._

But people like Einheria weren’t trained to go _“missing.”_ They were trained to wrench even gagged heads down to their shoulders to tear cyanide capsules from where Kikyo would hand-stitch them into their epaulets, and to—

This time, when DeRosa’s palm cracked across his jaw, all Alternis could do was stiffen in surprise, gritting his teeth to ride out the pain. He saw only two ways out of the Players’ Club, and to reconvene with Edea: he could either beat DeRosa back into a distraction, or he could hope and pray. For a plan, for a miracle – anything: anything to dull the way old sunspots on his corneas flashed like muzzle fire when he blinked, or to shake the Etch-a-Sketch image of Einheria that popped up in place of Edea every time he thought to his partner carrying the mission alone.

Alternis’ gaze had only flicked to the doors for an instant, but DeRosa did not let the gesture go unnoticed. “ _She’s_ out there,” he cooed, and there was no doubt as to who he was thinking of. “How far do you think she’ll get, carrying dead weight? Two, three blocks?”

“We’re in Florem, _schmuck_ ,” snapped Alternis, on instinct. “She can ditch him wherever, and nobody’ll question one more drugged-up tweaker on a park bench.” But he flinched back all the same as DeRosa leaned in again, heart hammering in his throat.

“And you?” purred DeRosa. “Will she ditch you ‘wherever,’ too? I mean—” and he reached a mocking hand out to cup Alternis’ cheek, brushing a stray silver curl away from his mopping brow “—to what end do you dog at her heels, Alternis? How many missions do you see yourself spending getting your _arse_ kicked to buy time while she sits pretty at the grownups’ table?”

Some ten minutes shy of ten years ago, DeRosa had managed to kick Alternis in the ribs, and the spiderweb of pain seemed to grow with his every inhale. But he straightened all the same, ignoring the needling pain as it drove into his lungs, and he twisted his grimace into a sneer as he lifted his gaze to DeRosa’s.

“Envy isn’t _just_ a bad look on you, buddy,” he spat. “It’s a cardinal sin, remember?”

“What in the world would I have to be jealous about?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alternis pressed on, staggering forward. DeRosa’s stare was portentous in what could only be a show of peacocking, of overcompensation, and Alternis found himself gesturing around them, trying in vain to grandstand. “How do the, ah, ‘pangs of disprized love’ feel, _Fiore_? Do you miss her? Is _that_ what this is about?”

Alternis’ half-baked plan backfired, as they were wont to do, almost instantly: as soon as DeRosa’s features leapt in silent rage, he schooled them once more – and rammed the heel of his boot solidly into Alternis’ chest. This was a far cry from his darting, stinging strikes from earlier: DeRosa had settled into that deadly efficiency that agencies around the world bred so well, and he wore it with surefire steadiness, beating at Alternis once more as though all that mattered were stomping him flat.

“You’re nothing to her, do you hear me? _Nothing_!” DeRosa panted, as Alternis fell into his elbow, driving all his weight into an armlock that held about as well as Cellophane. “And _she’s_ nothing to _me_. The two of you are everything wrong with the intelligence movement: you’re insolent, prying, disrespectful children, with no regards for the big pic— _aaARGH_!”

“Alternis!”

The parlour’s maintenance door was plastered with the same ornate wallpaper as the rest of the room, red damasks carefully aligned as to keep any indicators of the working class hidden from the clubgoers. But sure enough, from a nigh-imperceptible crack in the wall spilled a triangle of harsh fluorescent light, a shape that lunged and leapt like a Matisse cut-out as the shadows shot across it in blocky shapes again. It was not the only stark contrast to cut across the floor. Where their brawl had been mottled with deep greys and forgiving blurs, DeRosa, doubled over in pain, was blocked out by a sharp dark streak. A bloodstain was seeping from his arm to the floor, and Alternis saw his hand hung limply by his side. It had been Edea’s first shot.

He’d probably never close that fist again.

“ _Alternis_!”

Edea’s voice was more insistent, now, and she dashed across the parlour with jerking, uneasy steps. “You were taking so long,” she panted, coming to his side. “I thought you were . . . ”

_I might have been, if not for you._ Alternis moved wordlessly to take Edea’s arm – but even wounded, DeRosa was faster. He stumbled blindly for Edea, and as Alternis jerked forward to block him, he found himself being knocked aside, as well. Faint hissing breaths were Alternis’ only real indications as to what DeRosa’s next actions were: deep and shuddery meant a strike, rapid and soft meant retreat, and the spitty way each breath passed through his teeth meant that spindly bones were broken and delicate muscle in ribbons as DeRosa adjusted to a hole blasted through his palm.

But even that didn’t stop him from grabbling across the tangle of limbs and bruised torsos with a spelunker’s intent. The gun! Edea could hardly reach her holster as the two of them rolled this way and that under the pile DeRosa had wrestled them into; sure enough, Alternis had no sooner stopped reeling from a knee to his solar plexus than he saw a trembling hand slam over Edea’s wrist.

“No!” he hissed. It was a low blow (literally) but Alternis tumbled backward to brush under DeRosa’s side again – and to clamp his own hands around the mangled mess of DeRosa’s free palm. His yowls of pain filled the parlour with a life of their own, brassy echoes ringing in waves off walls so expertly carved to amplify the sounds they housed. DeRosa’s cries might have had some awesome horror, any other night. Tonight, though, Alternis was any one of eight million Floremians listening to screams fill the city night; he dug in harder, squishing the pads of his thumbs into what was either gravel on the floor or something much, much worse.

_“Bang!”_ Without the safety on, Alternis had known it was only a matter of time before the first shot was fired. He skid backwards on his heels (trying desperately not to think of why the floor was wet) (oh, _Crystals_ , the floor was wet) and watched as a few paces ahead of him, a flash of pale gold cut through the murk. Edea was moving as soon as her own feet hit the floor, and Alternis found himself scrambling after, the two of them circling like sharks around DeRosa (his hand the chum) as he recomposed himself.

“Give it up, Fiore,” Edea was snarling. “Come quietly. CIA custody isn’t that bad – no worse than what you forced Alternis through.”

“You always did like your high horse, dear,” he spat. “But I’m not – going – anywhere!”

Alternis dove as soon as DeRosa’s arm went up, and once more, they went down in a heap. Elbow! Jaw! Throat! Even DeRosa’s most mangled limbs writhed like snakes as he tossed himself this way and that, and Alternis knew there was no time to waste in trying to pin him down. Instead, Alternis let the tension in his joints go slack, letting DeRosa pull him back and forth like a rag doll as he fumbled singlehandedly for the gun. _“Bang!”_ There was one shot, fired harmlessly at the ceiling as Alternis collapsed onto DeRosa’s chest. _“Bang!”_ DeRosa had been the one to push him to the floor, fumbling so violently to bring his pistol level to his chest flat on the floor.

“Alternis, come on,” called Edea. She’d half-disappeared behind the maintenance door once more, the long lines of her silhouette cutting through that sliver of light from beyond like the bars of a jail cell. “We have to . . . ”

Alternis remembered thinking, way back when in Eternia, that there had been moments where time ran still. Agnès’ voice as she accepted that prize had been the toll of town hall bells, letting the world know that authorities had given the future to continue along its linear course; the sniper rifle going over the side of the balcony right after Edea herself had made it off that same edge had dropped hushes over the world below like they were the blocks and flies of some great cosmic theatre curtain.

Now was not one of those times. The dark of night was always uniquely timeless, and coursing adrenaline and rushing blood were its polar opposite, always existing in that breakneck, whitewater fast-forward. And so it wasn’t that Alternis was granted the luxury of slipping from the relentless onslaught of being, as he bore down on DeRosa: rather, the world seemed to stretch that much bigger, spin that much slower, and Alternis’ mind reeled with the whiplash of the world inching to a stop around him.

It was over in an instant. DeRosa had no more twitched, his only index finger hovering at the trigger of Edea’s tiny pistol, than Alternis had snapped his wrist around, and DeRosa’s shot fired – in the wrong direction.

When he could see again, he’d stumbled through the maintenance door, and Edea wrenched it shut behind him. The miles of brick and stagnant water of the sewers seemed to compress into the millimetre marks of a tape measure as the two of them flew down the walkways, that endless grey only registering in Alternis’ vision as stray sketch marks as they rounded corner after corner.

They must have been on Union Square by the time Edea signalled for him to stop – and pulled him into her, wrapping her arms around his waist tight enough to lift him from the concrete below.

“Sweet Crystals,” she whispered, moving to tuck Alternis’ head under her chin. “Sweet Crystals. We . . . ”

He could feel the vibrations of her words deep in her chest even under the Kevlar, and he found himself, head bowed low and knees bent, smiling into her collar. “We made it out, Alternis.”

“And Tiz?” Alternis didn’t want to jinx it.

But Edea only gave a great hiccup of a laugh, holding him at arm’s length to point to the manhole cover above. “He’s with some of the nicest hobos this city has to offer,” she trilled. “One of them said he should come to within the day.”

“Making friends in high places, are you, Edea?” teased Alternis. Her brilliant smile didn’t falter as she stuck her tongue out at him, and Alternis beamed right back as she moved to press his forehead against hers.

They were still, for a moment – just them and the lolling waves of the sewage – before Alternis felt her skin go cold against his, and his tongue thicken in his mouth. _“Friends in high places.”_ Fiore DeRosa might not have been a _“friend”_ to anyone, but . . .

She shook her head as he voiced the thought, and Alternis noted her palms were sticky as she closed both his hands in hers. “He isn’t dead,” she said, in that way of hers that made it a promise. “He wasn’t . . . the last shot didn’t kill him. He isn’t dead.”

“How can you know?” Alternis asked, feeling a weary furrow carve into his brow. “There wouldn’t exactly be a disturbance in the Force . . . ”

But Edea shook her head once more, and Alternis could only deflate against her solid frame, willing what little heat there was left in her body into his skin as his nose brushed against hers. She knew he wasn’t dead the same way that he knew Einheria was.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, as much for his own benefit as hers. Silently, she brought his hands to her lips, brushing the faintest of kisses across his knuckles: lasting just long enough to tell them both who _was_ still alive, and what just they could control.

“One thing at a time, Alternis,” she said, softer than he’d thought her capable of. “We won, today. Don’t forget that.”

New Year’s Eve in any major metropolis was one of those things Alternis felt was slated to be a catastrophe: it was written in the stars as in so many novelty pairs of sunglasses, and printed in the fine script on so many packets of illegally imported fireworks. Even so, Alternis’ smile was one that twinged at the muscles of his cheeks as he burst back into the waiting room of the university hospital, and he was struck, suddenly, by how the swill scraped from the crackedold coffee machine had somehow become the best espresso he’d ever had.

“I’ll take that as a good sign, shall I?”

There were sofas in the waiting room to the ICU, but this time of day, it was all but empty, so Alternis supposed there was no real harm in the way Edea had pushed an armada of armchairs into an awkward zigzag, all long lazy limbs as she sprawled across her labyrinth of a bench. Alternis wondered, briefly, if there was some Jenga block he could pull from her construction to knock her to the floor in one fell swoop.

But instead he settled in on one of the chairs she hadn’t quite fallen into, leaning back into her thigh behind him. “He’s talking. Real words! I didn’t know he’d had it in him even without the drugs.”

“Big words for someone with no Yulyana prizes of his own,” teased Edea. Alternis wondered, briefly, if it was too late to reconsider the whole chair Jenga thing, now that he was sitting there himself.

In the end, he only drained the last of that damn fine coffee. The Marshal had helped them usher Tiz Arrior into one of the city’s hospitals as soon as they’d emerged from the sewers three days prior, and he’d taken quickly to treatment – and a diet that consisted of substances other than horse tranquillisers. The skeleton crew of what was once Operation Crystal Ball had reconvened in the executive suites of some of the city’s most mid-range hotels in celebration of that fact: of Tiz sitting upright and of a staple of reservation rights reinstated into the war on oil, of a Pope believed by most to be free of the Bloodrose Legion’s clutches. Most of all, though, the agents rejoiced because it was the one night a year they were guaranteed to have off: and they’d ended the year with a successful rescue mission with minimal paperwork.

There were parts of Florem that truly hadn’t changed since the jazz age, but Alternis couldn’t help but feel the magic of his hometown in winter was about more than architecture. Stark-drawn streets cut neatly through avenues worlds away from one another, their chaos barely contained by the neat numbers on those hanging street signs. With snow swirling lazily down from the pearly cloud cover, it was all black-and-white, too: it was easy to see the neat grids of the borough as George Gershwin must have, skylines scrawled across sheet music.

But then, that might have been the company. Edea met him with a new peal of laughter every time he turned to her, and Alternis’ heart fluttered as her giggling did when he saw the way her nose, blasted red by the chill, wrinkled with her smiles. She’d spent most of the past three days in heated debate with Yew and the Marshal, as they tried to start building a solid case against Heinkel, but it was enough for Alternis to know she turned to him when she could: to know that whatever had happened, _they_ had something to build on, as well.

“I invited Magnolia for tonight, by the way,” Edea was explaining, swinging their intertwined hands back and forth as they walked. Anywhere else, Alternis might have wished she’d be more subtle, kept undercover – but there was little need for that, now. Everyone was invisible in Florem, if by no other virtue than the way they all belonged to the city. Alternis doubted their hands – hers in elegant leather gloves, his in mittens with little bats on them – were even the most dangerous ones flashing on First Avenue.

“She said she’s always wanted to see ‘zee Timez Square ba-all drop,’” Edea went on, adopting a heavy Sagittan accent. “And I can’t blame her. I’ve never even been to Times Square . . . why are we stopping?”

“Because,” said Alternis, “it’s a crowded street.” And one was only invisible in Florem as long as one didn’t interrupt the pedestrians’ steady flow. This was why he pulled Edea along behind him to the line to the curbside newsstand before he snaked his arms around her waist, pulling her close.

“Oh,” whispered Edea, when a sharp cry of _“Oy vey!”_ from the news vendor startled them apart once more. “What’s that for, Alternis?”

“Can’t I keep you on your toes?”

Edea chuckled softly into the collar of her coat, and her eyes twinkled under the heavy fan of her lashes. “You can try,” she breathed. It was her turn to pull Alternis along, this time, as she tugged him behind the newsstand (and those prying eyes) and guided him against the gum-stained wall. Her kiss was darting, rather than roaming, and Alternis had barely let himself lean into her rough embrace when she popped away, rocking back on her heels. “Let’s agree that round goes to me,” she told him.

Alternis’ skin was buzzing as he ran his hand through his hair. “Gladly,” he murmured.

They agreed to meet once more in the hotel lobby, all dolled up and ready to elbow their way to the forefront of a Times Square crowd, like so many other unassuming twenty-somethings. Someone had said Praline à la Mode would be performing, others insisted there’d be camera crews; there’d even been a rumour (courtesy of the pizza delivery guy, who’d been gabbing with Janne in rapid Orsterran for long enough for all three pies to go cold) that this year, they were just going to let the great crystal ball keep falling as it hit street level, showering thousands of New Year’s celebrators with tonnes of crushed glass. The three-star hotel had become a beehive for whispers and baldfaced lies in equal measure, and holed up in honeycomb rooms, Alternis was preparing the only way he knew how: with carefully applied kohl liner and a new pair of earrings (little skulls, that glowed in the dark).

If Alternis hadn’t known how ardently his friend hated the cold, he might have wagered Janne was actually planning on hitting the streets in just his towel. As it was, he only grinned as Janne stalked out of the shower, flopping forward on the bed.

“I’m going to ask Yew to kiss me at midnight,” he stated, matter-of-factly. Alternis knew what he was supposed to say – he was supposed to laugh, and make a joke, the way friends did – but all he could do was smile on. He’d recently found himself _such_ a romantic.

So much so, in fact, he barely blinked when six-thirty had come and gone, without a sign of Edea in the hotel lobby. “I’ll wait here,” he promised Janne, since joined by Yew, in his very finest, and Magnolia, who far outclassed him in just her work clothes. “You three should go make sure we get a good spot – we’ll handle the crowds when we get there.”

But then seven o’ clock passed, and seven thirty, Alternis could hardly help but feel that any butterflies left in his stomach had long since died, settling in a gnawing sort of pit at the base of his gut. As he pried himself from the overstuffed armchair he’d been sitting in, Alternis found himself stiffening at the streets outside the bay windows: had they always been so lifeless? So vampirically hectic, undead and neurotic? The lazy snowfall seemed to him now like so much cigarette ash being tapped over those best-laid holiday plans, and his stomach lurched with his every step.

Edea and Yew had been sharing a room at the far end of the fourteenth floor, their door wedged between a bland Cubist painting and a potted plant whose great girth meant it must have been entirely fake. “Edea!” he yelled, through those fanning plastic leaves. “Edea, did you choke to death on hairspray, or something?” His nails dug neat crescent cuts into his palm as he curled his fingers into a fist, banging on the door. “Come _on_ ,” called Alternis, “the point is sorta that we all spend New Year’s _together_!”

“Trouble in paradise, Dim?”

Victor Court had always been obnoxiously tall, and slumped, as he was, behind a plastic palladium and that great blank landscape, Alternis had never felt smaller in his presence. “Edea’s gone AWOL, if you must know,” he huffed. Victor’s eyes were narrow behind his glasses.

“Not the Victoria’s Secret Agent,” he drolled, crossing his arms. “Dude, seriously? She got picked up, like, two hours ago.”

“‘Picked up?’ Who by?”

“You’re shitting me, right?” Victor crossed his arms, arching his eyebrows as though Alternis were the very stupidest man alive. “ _Heinkel_ ,” he said, at last. “Her _boss_. He needed her back in Hartschild for some, I don’t know, threat to the Commonwealth. They were pretty boring to eavesdrop on . . . ”

All Alternis could do was balk, those dead butterflies in his stomach leaden as he felt his gut sink further and further under the weight of all that dread. _The Marshal hasn’t told anyone else,_ he thought, first; then, _Heinkel’s got Edea. And the Marshal didn’t see fit to warn anyone._

Heinkel had _Edea._

And perhaps it was just coincidence that a breeze should shudder down the hallway, then, but Alternis had long since stopped believing in chance. That icy wind was a message. Crystmas may have come and gone, and the year may have drawn to a close, but the winter was not over yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god . . . that shit hurted . . . 
> 
> can't believe i've finished vespers, and i hope you guys enjoyed! what started out as a way for me to procrastinate on my novel wound up becoming a life-consuming project in the bestest of ways. i've gotten to meet so many amazing people in the bravely fandom, and push myself as a writer to ~~make alternis dim have a personality~~ branch into new genres and themes. i'm so excited to pick the story up in its upcoming sequel, and i hope you're all in for the long haul!
> 
> lots and lots and lots of love to all of you. sláinte!


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